5 comments about Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers.

1. I have found this book to be an excellent, outstanding reference. My only complaint is that the index was occasionally not detailed enough to allow me to easily locate a specific topic for which I was looking; on occasion I've had to page through a section to find what I'm looking for. (This review refers to the first edition, although the second edition is now out so this may have been corrected.) Otherwise, I've found it far superior to the two other Fortran books I've used. It contains many examples. In my view it's excellent as both a F77 and F90/95 reference.



2. This is probably one of the worst programming books I have ever used. The index is terrible, which turns finding any random info into a page by page scavenger hunt. There are very few tables which give nice breakdown of parameters and what not, as the author prefered to scatter information about a single function call through two or three chapters. The "scientific and engineering" aspect of programming is so spoon fed it really does nothing to enhance understanding of the subject.
   
   Further if you are new to programming this book will do more harm than good. In trying to explain the concept of a loop, showing how to count to 10 is a much better example than calculating sin( x) by series expansion. After all, if you have the math background to do such a thing, and even a small amount of programming know how ( gathered from GOOD reference books ) you can do this kind of stuff without the author pretty much telling you what algorythm to use. The extra effort to code the sin(x) example, therefore, just gets in the way and muddies up the original point of the example ( to demonstrate a loop in this case. )
   
   I was introduced to this book in a college physics programming course and was amazed at how horrible this book was for teaching the subject. Students with little to no programming experience ( but plenty of physics experience )were lost and confused because the examples do a poor job of showing you what they are suposed to, and those with already good programming skills in other languages about died from paper cuts searching through the book by hand to find the syntax of the print function. A poor book all the way around. After some searching it appears that a good "Teach yourself Fortran 90 in 21 days," type book is hard to come by, but that ( imo ) is what fortran really needs to make it accessible to potential new users of the language, since meshing the actual 'language' and the 'for scientists and engineers' stuff just makes everything more complicated than it needs to be for a reference book. The only scientific/math/programming book I ever actually sold back to the college when the course was over.



3. It is outrightly silly to rate this excellent book one star and insinuate that it is a terrible write-up. Is it the thin index that makes it so bad, or the explanation of do loops using sin(x) series expansion, according to the first reviewer? If you are a scientist or an engineer (the target audience of the book) you'll probably see the wisdom of such an example instead of counting from 1 to 10 as if we are inside a grocery store.
   
   This is an excellent book not just for sake of learning the fortran language but also for writing modern and easily maintanable codes and algorithms. Whether you are a "pure" or "hybrid" programmer, you couldn't ever ask for something more.
   I am sure the author will subsequently improve the indexing since most people seem to take an offence in that but the contents are just right.Of course Metcalf/Reid (Fortran 90/95 Explained) is also a very good text but is largely for reference purposes. Metcalf/Reid DOES NOT and will not teach you the nitty-gritty of fortran programming. In Metcalf/Reid, you must already have been there in programming, but Chapman will gradually take you to whatever level you deisre, depending on what you need. Very importantly, Chapman sprinkles throughout the text, several scientific and engineering examples and I guess it is why the text was so named in the first place - Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers.
   
   It doesn't matter if you figure that you are way too cerebral and that Chapman is too simplistic for you. If you ever want to venture into programming, chances are that you are not an imbecile and any additional little knowledge gained is always an eternal treasure. This is an excellent text for programming in Fortran 90/95 and you'll be grateful that you did own a copy. Period.



4. Despite some of the negative comments on this book, I bought it anyway. The remarks that this is not a reference manual is unjust. Chapman never claims that the book is supposed to be a reference manual, so don't expect one. The book is written for those who begin to learn Fortran 95 or want to upgrade their skills to make the transition from Fortran 77.
   
   The build-up of the book is excellent. After every Chapter I had the feeling I learned something new, and understood how the Fortran 95 features would help me code more efficiently than in Fortran 77 (which I have done for about 20 years). The exercises and examples help a lot in that direction and I really appreciate the way in which Chapman uses real-life problems, like sorting names or phone numbers, or small physics problems.
   
   It has been said in reviews that the index is marginal, but that is clearly fixed in the Second Edition (the index is 20 pages long). Another suggestion that the examples are too simple is also unjust. I've learned quite a bit from them. Don't forget that it is no use to make the examples and exercises so difficult that they become untractable.
   
   On the critical side I can add a few items of discontent:
   - There are quite a few typos and errors in the book and despite the reference to the publishers website where errata should be found, that website doesn't even seem to know that the Second Edition exists. All the material there is for the first edition.
   - I do not see the use for providing flowcharts AND pseudo code next to the actual Fortran 95 code. The pseudo code is so much like the real code that it is just a waste of space. Flowcharts would suffice.
   - Chapman gets a bit repetitive at times. At the end of each Chapter it repeats the "Good practices" and the newly introduced commands and statements basically verbatim from earlier in that Chapter. Also each Quiz quite annoyingly starts with the sentence "This quiz provides a quick check to see if you understand the concepts introduced in this section......"
   
   Overall "Fortran 90/95 for Scientists and Engineers" lives up to its title. Assuming that Fortran 95 is mostly used by scientists and engineers this is a really good book to start learning Fortran 95. At the end of it you will be able to write efficient and correct Fortran 95 code.



5. I am currently enrolled in a course called high performance computing and this was the recommended text. I basically do not anything about computers let alone programming itself. This course was a 3rd yr maths subject. I found this book really easy to read, I could pick up the concepts and logic behind it all pretty easily and be right into the discussion within seconds. Lots of examples and test cases with concepts explained pretty clearly, even questions that you are likely to ask are all answered. If you never learnt to program, or new to fortran, this is the THE book to read. I pretty much just read this book and teach myself, I find it alot more use of my time than going lectures when I can just read fortran in my time. just for the record, look up fortan in wikipedia, this text is the first reference.

1 comments about Schaum's Outline of Computer Architecture.

1. Quite frankly, I was surprised at the usefulness of this Schaum's outline. I didn't think that the Schaum's outline format would work for a subject like computer architecture, but it does. All aspects of computer architecture are covered from computer arithmetic to processor design to memory systems to the advanced topic of multiprocessing. The format of the outline is a little different from the Schaum's usual formula. Each chapter consists of an "Objectives" section, followed by an introduction, followed by the various subsections of that chapter. There are examples and exercises on instruction set design, program design, block diagrams, and quite a few mathematical problems. This book is probably best suited to the advanced undergraduate or for self-study of the subject. If you are a graduate student that is using Hennessy's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" the level of difficulty of the mathematical problems in that book is not matched by this one, and you should look for another source. Otherwise I recommend this guide for most students of computer architecture.

5 comments about Joe Celko's SQL for Smarties: Advanced SQL Programming Third Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Data Management Systems).

1. As a DBA not doing so much with SQL this book is and has already been a great help for me creating complex queries.



2. Some of the concepts are a little lofty for the casual SQL programmer, but it is SQL for Smarties not dummies. He gives a lot of SQL code in his examples, but does not show the results of the code in a screen shot that I believe would be most helpful.
   
   Overall, I like the book and would buy it again given the opportunity.



3. I've seen various versions of this book sitting on DBA bookshelves for years. The concept is a good one - advanced sql for those of us who already have significant experience.
   
   This book is NOT an advanced SQL textbook. Another reviewer, Tim Boyes, describes it as "SQL 201", and he's exactly right. Most of the content in this book is just barely above basic SQL knowledge, and half the time I felt like I was reading a re-hash of SQL BOL.
   
   Another thing that I noticed (how could I miss it?) was the almost incomprehensible arrogance of the author, particularly when he compares the use of IDENTITY to drug abuse. Come on, Joe. That's just insulting.
   
   This one's going back to Amazon.



4. This is one of those books that are perhaps nice to have IN ADDITION to something better. Btw, do NOT overestimate the "for smarties" part in the title: the book is not all that advanced: it's more like an extensive cookbook with a lot of personal opinion thrown in (not always consistent; for example, in one place he inveighs against the evils of using sequential-number sequences as primary keys -- 'cause a table is not a sequence, you see, we're talking about sets here, who, by definition, are unordered -- OK, fine. Ten pages later he blasts the GUID type -- why? Because it's not inherently sequential and it's hard to spot the gaps in the sequences. But hey, why do we care about gaps? All we care about is that the field values be unique, which they are, gaps or no gaps. Seems like GUIDs should be perfect from the set-theoretical point of view, but no, he doesn't like them -- precisely because of the presence of those aspects, the lack of which he bemoaned one chapter back in the IDENTITY type. It's like he wrote these two chapters one ten years after the other, and forgot what he was talking about in one when writing the other.
   
   The content (or rather the intent behind it) is very good. There's a logical progression from the overall-schema things, to tables, and so on, including such esoterica as hierarchies and graphs (which is good not only, or even not so much because of the topics themselves, but because nice recent SQL features like CTEs are used a lot in the sample code thus demonstrating their non-trivial use).
   
   The downsides: the main flaw in Celko's writing is that whatever he writes reads like a two-page journal article, by which I mean it's all a perfunctorily dashed-off collection of tidbits; the overall structure is very tenuous (for example, he starts the hierarchies' chapter by saying they're a sort of graphs -- but the graphs proper chapter comes afterwards: wouldn't it make more sense to switch their order in the book then?) Some chapters are borrowed from other writers: for example, the chapter on temporal databases is taken, or rather squeezed out of Snodgrass's book (which I happened to be reading in parallel and thus was able to notice that). I'm not hinting at plagiarism here: I'm sure Snodgrass was aware of this borrowing and had OK'ed it, but first it would be nice to mention the fact of borrowing (I think), and second, and most important, when you compress a book into a chapter, you gotta do it very carefully so as to keep the material connected, coherent, and clear. This is not the case here (go for the original: it's good, and can be downloaded for free; google on the name).
   
   In general, Celko's writing, while not abhorrent, is mostly (though not everywhere) very sloppy; everything reads like a first draft never touched again by either the author or an editor. A fair amount of typos, and a lot of unclear, careless pages that make you struggle for meaning (not always successfully). Mangled French again: Joseph, if there's an accent over the last 'e' in a masculine form of a participle, it's gotta be an accent aigu, not accent grave (feminine simply adds an extra 'e' w/o changing anything else); thus it's 'née' not 'nèe'. Maybe it's a typo, but it's consistently repeated thoughout the book (and actually present in his other books!). While we're here: "Borland (née Inprise)" is actually the other way around: Inprise (née Borland).
   
   There's no question that the author is a smart guy, but writing isn't his forte and he should be less casual about it -- and then, he should also insist that his publisher provide good editorial oversight. I think MK is a good publisher, and I think they ought to be able to do a better job helping their writers achieve readability.
   
   Bottom line: I don't regret having this book; it's friendly and chatty (in a good sense); the inherently dry material is livened up a bit by a sprinkling of curious trivia; it's been somewhat enlightening on the first read, and repeatedly useful as a reference afterwards. Otoh, it's written sloppily and I feel that, inasmuch as I benefitted from it, I did only because I happen to have enough foundation to compensate for its flaws on my own. But I'm not looking for this kind of effort when reading technical books though, so three stars. Could be more, but for that the book needs to be aggressively edited and restructured. It's the third edition, btw: it would seem that there's been plenty of time to do just that.
   
   All in all, I recommend it, but only half-heartedly: as long as the prospective reader understands that this is not a terribly advanced book, as well that the reading won't be easy. The book's OK, but not on par with what you get from writers like Gray or Date.



5. As a DBA, I use this book often. It's been helpful and I recommend it to others.
   
   My issue with this book is not its content, it's the terrible typesetting throughout. The text is the raggedest of ragged right, sample SQL code wraps in odd places, diagrams are sloppy (redraw the diagrams by hand if you need to, it was done tastefully in Kernighan and Richie), title pages are covered in large and unnecessary gradient images. The base font is big, which wastes space and makes the book inconveniently thick, thick enough to pass for another "Teach Yourself C in 24 hours" doorstop. Overall, I'm surprised by the cheap appearance of this book, given its well deserved popularity.
   
   Celko comes across as a bare bones purist. He knows when to use straight SQL to solve a problem (as often as possible). It's time for him ---or his publisher--- to use straight LaTeX to solve the typesetting problem.

2 comments about L Is For Last Frontier: An Alaska Alphabet Edition 1. (Discover America State By State. Alphabet Series).

1. This is a beautifully illustrated book with LOADS of information presented in a wonderful rhyming format for younger children. For older children the additional information in the margins is excellent. This is a great resource for teachers to use when instructing students about the Native culture,the environment and our 49th state. I highly recommend it and all of the other Discover America State by State Alphabet Series books.



2. I gave this book to my nephew who is moving to Alaska, and we have all learned from it. The pictures are beautiful as well.

No comments about Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Programming Unleashed.

No comments about Creating Vista Gadgets: Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript with Examples in RSS, Ajax, ActiveX (COM) and Silverlight.

No comments about 3D Game Environments: Create Professional 3D Game Worlds.

5 comments about Pro PHP Security.

1. PHP applications written without a concern for security risk cross-site scripting, SQL injection, session hijacking, and a multitude of other potential problems. This book examines how to setup a secure environment including encryption, hashing, SSL and using PHP to connect to SSL servers. The authors also examine how to install and configure OpenSSH and using it with PHP applications. Of course they also deal with the usual concerns of user authentication, permissions, restrictions, validating input, preventing SQL injection, preventing cross-site scripting, preventing remote execution (including PHP code injection and embedding), security for temporary files, and preventing session hijacking. The Pro PHP Security is written specifically for PHP programmers working in the Apache, MySQL, and PHP 5 environment and is highly recommended



2. Unless you're already very well-versed in the subject matter, ( sql injection, cross-site scripting, session hijacking, remote execution, sanitizing user data/input, ssh, encryption, ssl, dangers of shared-host scenarios, bulletproofing db installations, user verification, captchas, remote procedure calls ) this material is relatively comprehensive and valuable. Well-organized, well thought out, I won't hesitate to recommend this one.



3. The book is entitled PHP security. But the actual content covers very little PHP at
   all: less than 20 percent. It tries to cover everything from UNIX permission,SSH
   and all other security issues, but really doesn't have much to do with PHP. So I
   think the title is highly misleading. For someone interested in the general
   security issues, it might be a fine book. But not for programmers want to know
   the security about PHP.



4. Like the title states this book tells you about a lot of security issues you should be aware of, but doesn't go in depth for many solutions. Especially xss which is the only reason i bought the book. For how much the book costs i figured it would include some really good php solutions. I mean the thing is in black and white, what's with the price tag that doesn't tell me anything that i can't find on the web.



5. I found Pro PHP Security a very informative book. I received this book around the same time that I began developing online financial software. This book lived up to the name and answered a lot of my questions.
   
   I found the chapter on encryption and hashing very interesting. I knew what each system of protection accomplished but not how. Next the authors proceeded to discuss Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and how certificates are created. It was fun to be able to create my own certificate and keys, and gain a better understanding of how the whole process works.
   
   After covering server security and connection security, the authors moved onto secure programming. The first chapter covers user input validation. This is one area that many programmers, myself included, do not devote much time. If you can sanitize the data you get from the user, you have overcome one of the largest hurdles of securing your code.
   
   After that chapter, each following chapter begins with the presentation of an exploit and how it works, followed by discussions of sites affected by these exploits, and concluding with how to prevent it. SQL injection, cross-site scripting, remote execution and session hijacking are some of the exploits discussed. This section of the book gave me plenty to think about and more than enough to work on implementing.
   
   If anyone is a PHP programmer and deals with any kind of sensitive data, then this book is a must read. The authors attempt to provide all the best practices because one method may not work in a given situation, but they also let you know the disadvantages of each method. As Snyder and Southwell discuss in the first chapter, as developers we cannot eliminate risk but we can do our best to mitigate it.

No comments about GoldMine 8 For Dummies (For Dummies (Computer/Tech)).

5 comments about Beginning REALbasic: From Novice to Professional (Expert's Voice).

1. I'm honestly surprised at the good reviews this book has gotten. I own literally hundreds of technical books (and have even helped write a couple), and believe I know good technical writing when I read it. Good technical writing makes the reader more enlightened, not more confused and frustrated. But after spending several trying hours with this book, the latter is just how I feel.
   
   I don't doubt that Mr. Ford is a whiz programmer, and has a thorough understanding of the subject. But it's quite a different skill set to be able to convey that understanding in a methodical and enlightening way.
   
   There's certainly a lot of information in this book, and much of it is helpful. But what drove me up the wall, among other things, is the subtle penchant the author seems to have for assuming that you already know what it is that he's referring to, even before he's actually bothered to explain it.
   
   Thus, one of the first things I looked for was a brief Glossary of key terms and concepts. ... There wasn't any.
   
   Failing that, I resorted to the Index -- which turns out to be quite hit-or-miss as well. A cursory search through the book reveals that certain key terms appear a full *80 pages* or more before their earliest reference in the index ("module" and "method" are but two examples).
   
   And a handful of key terms don't even appear in the index at all! (Omissions I quickly chanced across included: class[!] ... declare ... intrinsic ... literal ... variant. And I'm sure if I continued to plow through this tome, my guess is I'd find a bunch more.)
   
   Additionally, some passages describing key concepts scream out for a well-placed diagram or two. Instead, they're conveyed through languorous prose. (Example: Classes/Subclass/Super Class, on pages 209 & 211.)
   
   There's also circumlocution: for example, on p.117, Mr. Ford goes on about how "difficult" it is to preview how menus will look under different OS's ... and then in the very next paragraph, demonstrates how easy it is!
   
   But the last straw, and what spoke volumes to me, was a number of minor typos scattered throughout the text. Clearly, if I could find a bunch of these in just the first hour or two of reading, then clearly there wasn't a decent book editor/proofreader assigned to the case. (Someone worth their salt could also have helped spruce up organization of the content, and made it more accessible in general, with respect to much of the above.)
   
   In spite of this book being billed as for "Beginners" and "Novices" -- I frequently got the impression that it's really targeted for *experienced* programmers (who just happen to be transitioning from some other language, like Visual Basic).
   
   Thus, in spite of the glossy cover (and even the author's CV), I do get the distinct impression that the book is put out by a relatively-fledgling publishing company. Clearly, they aren't one of the majors -- or for that matter, my impression goes, even particularly experienced in this realm.
   
   Now, don't get me wrong: I'm a very technically-savvy guy. And I really don't have an axe to grind. I just didn't know RealBasic ... which is why I bought this book! It's too bad there's such a dearth of current material on this intriguing cross-platform development environment, and thus, more choices of good books on the subject.
   
   Nevertheless, based on all the foregoing, you may consider looking elsewhere (even at older books, by more established authors), if you're looking for a genuinely well-written introduction to the topic. As soon as I finish posting this review, I'm going to do the same.
   
   
   [Addendum, 7/8/07]:
   Yesterday, I just happened to run across the author's latest book, "AppleScript Studio Programming for the Absolute Beginner". Surprisingly, it's far better and seems to address many of the weaknesses from this book, listed above. But unfortunately, it's not about RealBasic! The notable difference in style, though, is enough to confirm my hunch that what "Beginning REALbasic" could have used was more rigorous editing and insightful layout, by someone knowledgeable about presenting technical material. Hopefully, someone will catch onto this for a future edition ... or perhaps some other author will give the subject a go. In the meantime, I'm going to return this book, and pick up the Neuberg and Tejkowski ones instead.



2. For me, this book is a good review. I've done a lot of programming, so it's nice to get some specific tips on REALbasic to remind me how it works as opposed to other languages. It is written from an IT guy's viewpoint, so it is pretty thorough. It doesn't quite go as advanced as I need, and it's so thoroughly multi-OS that I have to dig out info about Mac OS X, which is all I'm really interested in.



3. While not as in depth as I would like, this book is definatley helpful for RealBasic beginners. I went from clueless to creating decent apps in a couple days. Modifying the included examples to my own purposes was easy. I added bookmark functionality to the web browser, tweaked this and that just to see what I could do, and am very pleased.
   
   
   recommended.



4. Looking to learn REALbasic...this book won't get you there. It will get you interested. It will even show you what it's capable of doing. It just won't get you there. If you already know REALbasic, there's nothing new to learn here. If you don't, just don't expect this to be the only book you purchase to learn it.
   
   That being said, the book is well-written and easy to follow. I recommend it, but only if you know what you are getting and that is basically an intro to REALbasic.



5. and then you realize that REALBasic does not have the sophistication of Visual Basic. Forget about a converting program, there is just not enough similarities between the two languages. I have several thousand pages of books on Visual Basic, but just this one book on REALBasic. Maybe there needs to be more books to get across all the capabilities of REALBasic.
   The author of this book gives examples, but they are simple and of limited use in writing programs.