No comments about Maple Animation.

No comments about Certificate Physical and Human Geography (New Oxford Progressive Geography).

5 comments about Essential Flash 4 for Web Professionals.

1. I really liked this book. It contains 2 projects and it guides you through all the steps you need to complete them. But the book doesn't really provide any explanation of what you are doing or why you are doing it, so I would recommend that you have another Flash book on hand that you can use as a reference. Despite this I think this book is a great way to learn Flash for those who have no previous experience with it. It is an easy introduction. You don't have to read through pages of information and explanations, which is the case with other web books, to get a good basic knowledge of the application.



2. In most ways this is a typical tutorial book. Talk about a feature . . . work on a project using the feature. The exercises were pretty good and so were the explanations. If you are already good at Flash, this may not be a good choice of books, as it doesn't get very advanced.

   One thing I like about this book is that the publishers have all of the source files for download on a web site (as opposed to putting them on a CD). You'll notice that this book is considerably cheaper than similar books. When you download the files, you have the choice of loading them one at a time, as you need them, or you can download them all at once (packed into a zip archive).

   The one thing that sets this tutorial apart from others is that it makes available, the source files for the projects at every step of the way. As I complete tutorials, I like to experiment a lot. It was very useful to have these source files to resort to in times that my experimentation totally screwed up the project.

   If you are a beginner or intermediate at Flash I recommend this book.




3. This is a really well written book for those who want to learn Flash and had no prior experience with it. After this you might want to get some other book to learn more about it, but for beginners this is the book to start from.



4. I had to make a dynamic website under a tight deadline. The book served very beneficial for abeginner like me who virtually knew nothing about using flash or how it worked. The book teaches everything from scratch. The first 5 chapters are the most useful in the book. I would highly recommend the book for someone who is new to this technology.



5. As an advanced Flash user and working web/graphics professional I would say that this book is not essential for web professionals. I didn't learn a thing from this book, I've learned much more from many other Flash books, but not this one! This book covered very little in a very complicated manner. I was dissapointed with the complex way in which simple concepts were explained. I would not recommend this book.

No comments about Visual Design on the Computer, Second Edition.

No comments about Spatial Multimedia and Virtual Reality.

5 comments about The Zen of Direct3D Game Programming (Prima Tech's Game Development).

1. I am now half way through this book and find it ok in some ways and not ok in other ways.

   The CD does not correlate at all well with the examples in the book. This is a serious flaw, imho.

   I judge most of the text in the book itself to be adequately written. It could have been better.

   The book does seem to cover the important issues, however, so it does have value.

   One can learn from this book.




2. I am not sure how to get the 3d examples to run in full screen, but if you make a few changes, they will run windowed pretty well.

   First off you need to change the function InitDirect3DDevice that initializes direct x.
   change to: d3dpp.BackBufferFormat = d3ddm.Format;
   change to: d3dpp.Windowed = TRUE;
   and comment out anything that starts out with d3dpp.FullScreen

   then there is something wrong with the printing of the frame rate
   comment out FrameCount(); from GameLoop()
   comment out PrintFrameRate(); from Render()

   it also makes it nice to change the window style to an overlapped window, hope that helped.




3. This book hardly qualifies to use the word Zen in its title if refering to Direct3D. Of the 16 chapters in the book, a mere 5 of them actually deal with things related to Direct3D. The first seven chapters deal only with Windows programming, which anyone who is reading a "Zen" book should already know. There is a lot of time spent talking about using the GDI with DirectGraphics surfaces which, by the author's own admission, is not adequately fast enough to write a game.

   The final project of the book is to simulate a solar system with planets and moons revolving around the sun. There is no discussion whatsoever about keyframe or skeletal animation techniques.

   Mr. Walsh may be living in a world where all 3D games are space shooters where we only have to be able to rotate planets and spaceships, but maybe he should realize that the rest of us are not. Anyone interested in really programming in 3D needs real animation techniques which do not just include rotation and translation.

   This is all beside the fact that you have to recompile all of the code on the CD because the compiled version is the same program copied over and over and over...

   Your money is much better spent on a better book. Even Advanced 3-D Game Programming using DirectX 7.0 by Andre Perez is a better but out-of-date choice.




4. I see that many readers seem to have had problems getting the samples to compile. Having trouble using your compiler and debugging tools? I ran into compile errors, fixed them. Had a few runtime errors, fixed them too. Got every sample up and running with no tears.
   
   Many of the readers who expressed dismay at simple compile errors go on to state that the have "solid" or "sound" or "extensive" C++ experience....
   
   My only real complaint is that EVERY SINGLE VOLUME in the original Premier Press series had that danged C++ primer section that takes up almost a third of the book, rewritten over and over by each successive author. Thankfully, the newer books in the series seem to have dropped this bad habit. The end samples had that "cool" console and background that resized the background image for every frame - thus bad framerates. If you resize the image on load and then render the new image to the buffer instead it eliminates tons of overhead - bringing framerates up to the cap of 60fps on most systems (I have a computer graveyard here and some of them were only able to reach 28fps - p2/400 w/256MB RAM and an old Voodoo 2). Eliminating the background starfield brought the framerate up to 60fps on all of my systems.
   
   Zen Lesson 1: Optimization is all in YOUR head.
   
   And as far as "figuring out what order to call" various functions - a little time with a piece of paper and a little know-how with flowcharts might help you out there.
   
   Some day you should try sitting down with a technical whitepaper on a system and try sorting things out from that. Too many people are apron-string programmers who can't figure out anything for themselves - hand-holding babies without a clue. Stop whining, learn something about the trade you're trying to embrace, and realize that mommy isn't going to code your game for you.
   
   Have a nice day and happy coding.
   
   Richard



5. I got this book dirt cheap at HalfPricedBooks so I can't complain too much, if you can get it cheap why not!
   
   I think it will be a good reference book for beginning directX programmers. What you end up with is a simple working 3d game engine. Most of what you get is functions to simplify the iterface with dx8.
   
   However I found the writing style highly annoying. My english teachers repeated over and over "take out the fluff". And when all you are looking for is information (its a programming book not a novel) this book has way to much fluff. The author actually says his English teachers would never have guessed he would write a book (or if he did it would look like this book).
   
   The examples he shows in the book are not all on the CD and he doesnt always give explicit enough instructions to setup the examples yourself (for me). Which code base am I suppose to use for this example, the final code base? chapter 5 code base?
   
   But hopefully this will serve as a basic (and cheap) introduction which I will supplement with some internet research. My next step will be to code a simple game using the engine from this book, but that will definitely require some additional resources

1 comments about Fundamentals of Computer Aided Geometric Design.

1. Very thorough cover of curve and surface topics,
   with many original results.
   Brilliant bibliography.
   Extremely useful for serious CAD research.

2 comments about Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (Graphics Series).

1. Micromedia Flash, now part of the Adobe family, has long been thought of as an annimation tool for web sites. This book stresses that Flash is also capable of producing high-quality photorealistic illustrations. To get the most out of the book you should have some experience with Flash. As such, I consider it an intermediate level book.
   
   This is the second edition of this book, with the new edition focusing on more advanced illustrating projects, covering the new features built into Flash Professional 8, and covering points discovered since the first edition appeared.
   
   The format of the book is basically a tutorial. It starts with simple line art, like you might use to illustrate assembly instructions for a bookcase. From there it goes on to more complex items eventually getting up to what the author calls 'photorealistic.' The images are close to photo quality. As some of these illustrations are quite complex, they are included on a CD supplied with the book.
   
   Using Flash as the way to generate illustrations increases the utility of the program, their data storage formats are smaller than those of many other programs, and of course animation is available.



2. I'm not a fan of Charles River Media's books. They don't have color illustrations, aren't well proofread and just generally seem cheaply put together.
   
   Despite all that, Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is a must-have book for anyone using Flash. Firebaugh's use of Flash as an illustration tool is mind blowing, using simple vector tools to create photo-realistic images.
   
   The problems of being published by CRM are evident though. The black & white pictures make it hard to judge what's going on and there are a few confusing typos and mis-wordings. (he often says "delete" when he really means "cut") You end up stuck having to have the FLA files right in front of you while you read. It's a good way to learn, but rather inconvenient.
   
   I don't want to come off as down on this book just because I don't like the publisher. There's tons of great learning in this book. The source files are set up so you can poke through each step and see how things are put together. Also there are exercises at the end of each chapter to practice what you've learned.
   
   All in all, Illustrating with Macromedia Flash Professional 8 puts you on the path the to do things with Flash you never thought were possible.

4 comments about Handbook of Geometric Programming Using Open Geometry GL.

1. the book and associated library look interesting.
   i have not read it, only flipped through it.
   i almost bought it but decided to do a bit of research
   before hand. i'm glad i did, because the open geometry
   library is in fact a closed source library
   (as i understand it you must buy the book to get the source).
   the word open is apparently derived from opengl.
   the problem is that the word open in opengl is the 'open' of 'open standards' and 'open source'.
   this is at best an ignorance of the current trends
   in the software development world, and at worst, plain misleading.
   when the authors either change the library's
   license or the library's name to more directly reflect the true
   nature of its license, i'll be glad to buy the book and review it again.
   i think that they would find that by open sourcing their business model
   they would stand to make a lot more money, as they are not really
   in the business of selling software, but selling books. who wants to buy
   buy a book about an obscure closed source library that could disappear tomorrow?



2. Don't waste your money. This is some of the most unorganized, poorly commented code I've ever seen. Some of the code is in German! The book is in English so silly me, I expected the code to be use English words for variable and function names. An example of their lack of attention to detail is the first example in the book (circumcircle) is not even in try.cpp. Yes, I fixed the example myself, but this is an example of the author's sloppiness. How about file names like a.cpp, b.cpp, c.cpp, etc! This was an ... waste of time for me.



3. Open Geometry is a collection of C++ classes making it easy to program advanced three-dimensional graphics. The classes correspond to geometrical objects like spheres, conics, "path curves", b-spline surfaces etc. Open Geometry is distributed as source code, so you get, e.g., a project to open in Microsoft Visual C++. You can add your own source code to that project (or a copy of it). What makes the book so interesting, are the given 101 well-explained examples. Together with a large number of instructives figures, they build up a geometry book about kinematics, projective geometry, differential geometry etc. This seems to be a missing link between theory and programming practice. I recommend it!!



4. The 700 page book is worth reading: It's actually a geometry book that tells you about many geometric details which you might never have heard about before: I did not know, e.g., about a quite useful developable surface named "wobbler" or "oloid", and how one can fold and unfold such surfaces via computer. The book comes with a ready to use software. The user writes little C++-programs that are linked to the library. The code of the librabry is just there to be compiled, and is not very well documented. However, it need not, since the user should only focus on his oder her part. Therefore, templets are provided that can be modified (learning by doing). Within a few hours, one is familiar with the system.

No comments about Comic Art of the United States through 2000, Animation and Cartoons: An International Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Popular Culture).