5 comments about Flash 5.0: Graphics, Animation & Interactivity.

1. This is the best reference book ever! I followed the book step by step and learned many Flash shortcuts and details that I can't find in other books. I try to work on one sample in this book. However, there are some codes wrong in my application and I couldn't find the error. So, I got enough guts and sent the author an email. the author replied me the next day, and helped me to solve the problem. He also explained my mistake. Pretty cool!



2. This is a good and useful book, but it could be better.
   Each function is presented first with explanatory prose, then with step-by-step instructions. The explanatory prose doesn't make any sense until after going through the step-by-step instructions.

   After a few chapters, I decided that "Flash 5 Hands-on Training" (0201731347) was easier to understand, so I switched books.

   Neither book, however, gives clear instructions on how to create navigation buttons. I had to spend hours of trial and error.

   Nor does either book explain how to make input boxes and provide feedback for an educational program. I am having to purchase a few more Flash 5 manuals and hope that at least one of those manuals will help me.




3. This is a good and useful book, but it could be better.
   Each function is presented first with explanatory prose, then with step-by-step instructions. The explanatory prose doesn't make any sense until after going through the step-by-step instructions.

   After a few chapters, I decided that "Flash 5 Hands-on Training" (0201731347) was easier to understand, so I switched books.

   Neither book, however, gives clear instructions on how to create navigation buttons. I had to spend hours of trial and error.

   Nor does either book explain how to make input boxes and provide feedback for an educational program. I am having to purchase a few more Flash 5 manuals and hope that at least one of those manuals will help me.




4. This is a good and useful book, but it could be better.
   Each function is presented first with explanatory prose, then with step-by-step instructions. The explanatory prose doesn't make any sense until after going through the step-by-step instructions.

   After a few chapters, I decided that "Flash 5 Hands-on Training" (0201731347) was easier to understand, so I switched books.

   Neither book, however, gives clear instructions on how to create navigation buttons. I had to spend hours of trial and error.

   Nor does either book explain how to make input boxes and provide feedback for an educational program. I am having to purchase a few more Flash 5 manuals and hope that at least one of those manuals will help me.




5. Flash 5.0 GA&I is a great book from James Mohler, a leading multimedia specialist. The book covers enough detail for more advanced flash animators but is easy to read and understand for beginners. The book covers everything from the layout of Flash to integrating it with your website. Mr. Mohler not only shows you how Flash works, but also the intricacies of digital graphics. I think this last point is very important because it helps beginners grasp some of the concepts of digital graphics, which they can take with them when they learn other digital multimedia. This is an all-around great book for people interested in learning Macromedia Flash and digital graphics.

5 comments about The Animation : Master 2000 Handbook (Graphics Series).

1. This is more for the beginners. If you've read and understood the manual, then you don't need this book. It's just the same again more in depth and with more tutorials. The special features not mentioned in the manual (like flocking..) are kept very short in here. The online help of the software should often be enough. If you didn't catch the idea with the manuals explenations then.. buy it!



2. The only reason I bought this book was to learn how to use Animation Master. I have the Book that came with the software which is about a "2 ½ star" book. After much research and review of other animation programs, I have concluded that Animation Master is a "5 star" program with "2 ½ star support".

   Here is a simple analogy. A person needs to get to a street called "E street" and in order to get there they must know that there is an A,B,C,D, street. In comparison the author of this book constantly gives directions like take A,B,D, or A,C,D leaving out essential details thus leaving the student of this excellent animation program frustrated and confused. Basically the author of this book is probably an excellent animator and story teller. As a writer myself I remind the author that if the details of a story are left out a percentage of the audience will bail thus creating inappropriate and negative views about the potential of becoming animators and I believe that the author is trying to help people to become animation enthusiast not discourage them.

   If you want to be as good in writing your tutorials as you are hopfully an animator then please take the time to avoid assumptions about your readers. If on the other hand you have written the book to get quick cash because of very little competition. Then I will ask that someone who has more tolerance of beginners and understands the essential nature of including all of the steps A,B,C,D,E please take the challenge.

   In conclusion I believe that this is a program well worth the price of admission . I only ask for a larger group of us who are newer and can learn well with a more detailed tutorial book that someone please take on this needed to be done task.

   P.S. to Jeff Paries I an not trying to insult you. I'm simply asking for a more complete and linear set of tutorials from you or anyone else. There is a business need at this graphic revolutionary time even if you write two books. Beginning to Intermediate book one followed by Intermediate to Advance. Then we are happier to give the writer more money that they deserve and word of mouth advertising is expanded to a higher level.

   Thank you for your time. renzai@pdai.com




3. Its not a question whether I can recommend this book or not. Why do I say this? Its because the original manual that comes with Animation Master is so awful that you have to buy this book to make sense of it all.

   Now in the case of reviewing the book, there is some good things to say and some bad things to say:

   First of all, Jeff Paries is extremely knowledgable on the subject matter. The book is packed with so much information (600 pages worth) so that makes it a valuable tool.

   The biggest complaint is that some of the tutorials need clarification. I went through a lot of them and I find bits of essential information missing. Somethings I have to improvise and experiment (which is not necessarily a bad thing but it can be frustrating). I think the author (and the editors too) should take some test subjects and let them go through the tutorials and point out any inconstancies in the text.





4. I purchased the Animation Master 98 Handbook almost 2 years ago and found it to be very benificial to increasing my skills with Animation Master... to a degree.

   I recently purchased the AM2000 Handbook in hopes that it would cover/correct problems in the first book. Yet the incomplete, vauge, and at times, unreliable instructions that the 98 Handbook had left me with returned in the AM2000 Handbook

   99.9% of all my problems stem from the modeling tutorials, especially the Advanced Modeling section. At times you are left to "figure it out for yourself" instead of being walked through each step in the process. The most disappointing is the modeling tutorial of the female body. Where Mr. Paries spends 10 pages on how to model a simple fish, he spends only 11 pages describing how to model the "intricate" human female.

   If you own the AM98 Handbook, see if you can find this "updated" version at your local library, borrow it from a friend, or just don't worry about it. There's really not much new in this edition and very few problems were fixed from the preceding edition.

   If you are just learning AM, pick it up. It may not be the most complete and/or detailed book that it should be, but it will give you a good idea of some of the things you can do with AM.




5. I had some of the same problems using this aftermarket manual as I did trying to use the original, worthless A:M manual-and then it created some new problems of its own. Example: neither book includes anything resembling a "quick-start" guide, that is, a straightforward no-options approach to get a quick, trouble-free 3D result right off the bat. Oh no. Too simple. The official manual doesn't even reveal how to draw a line onscreen until page 199. The Paries book starts its modeling tutorial earlier, on page 47, but does it by handing the reader a prebuilt model off the included CD-ROM. How does that teach anyone how to design a 3D model?
   If I ever learn how to use this software, I'm going to write my own doggone handbook.

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.

No comments about New Key Geography Interactions (Key Geography).

2 comments about Introduction to Ordinary Differential Equations with Mathematica: An Integrated Multimedia Approach.

1. Really good, if not best. It is the resource text as an example for textbooks for the years to come. You learn to work out analytically first and then computing and numerically. The Mathematica notebook format of the acompaning CD-Rom is not only containing all the 900 pages of the book and it's graphycs but also animations and the solutions to exercises and Mathematica exercises. I would have liked that my first ODE textbook would have been like that one. Fantastic!



2. No matter what you think about differential equations, you just got to have that book. The software that comes with it, is dynamite, and fully adds to Mathematica's Dsolve. Fact is, after you read the book you may understand what Ordinary Differential Equations are all about. "By the way there is nothing ordinary about Differential equations". These guys really know their stuff. Even better they can really explain it well. The book reads like someone is constantly talking to you or guiding you. The presentation is great. My only problem is that I finally understood the stuff. [ A pleasant one at that] The other fascinating thing about the book is the historical backgound of the mathematicians who contibuted to the discovery of DEs. This makes the book so enjoyable. Read this book and your girlfriend/boygriend will think you are a true inspired genius. However make it fast. They are bound to find out for themselves. This book will be true classic. BTW, you c! ould also look up another great book on DE. Authors are Blanchard, Devaney and Hall. Published by Brooks/Cole. These two books are all you should ever need.

No comments about Exploring Flash MX 2004 (Design Exploration).

3 comments about Mathematica for Scientists and Engineers.

1. This book zeros in on the exact problems us technical people have solving problems with MMA. It is not introductory. After you have struggled with Wolfram's book, you can find the answer here. Example: how to get functions of functions to evaluate the way you want them too, without error messages.



2. While Wolfram's The Mathematica Book is a necessary reference for using Mathematica, Bahder's one is an excellent and advanced guidance to use Mathematica in solving real problems. For my own experience, the Wolfram's manual is pointless and so little helpful for beginners; only after recognizing the style of Mathematica and learning it through complete and non-trivial problems I started to really enjoy Mathematica. This book is somewhat out-of-date ONLY in accompanied Mathematica version (2.2), but its great goodness is totally not disturbed. I strongly recommend this book!



3. This books really teaches you how to work effectively with Mathematica. It helps to understand the basic ideas of Mathematica's "inner mechanics" with very carefully selected examples. I would recommend reading this book after you have read some introductory course. This book will give you a much deeper insight into Mathematica. Inspite the fact that the text relies on Mathematica 2.2 this is in no way outdated even now, when Mathematica 4.2 available.

1 comments about How Computer Graphics Work.

1. It is a very good educational book, I use it in various classes at different levels. I suggest it for all who wants to begin to understand computer graphics not only from the user point of view.

1 comments about VRML Programmer's Library.

1. This book is completely inadequate. It just barely skirts the shores of the fundamentals of VRML and then abandons you. Other books by such acknowledged gurus as Marc Pesce go far deeper into the Zen of VRML and Tao of programming for VRML with Java and other technologies. Compared to most competitive volumes, Jamsa's tome is decidedly light on useful content.

No comments about New Key Geography Foundations.