1 comments about First Steps: Developing BizTalk Applications.

1. This is a very good introduction to BizTalk 2006 and its use of Visual Studio 2005. What I found to be lacking are references to others reference materials for a more detailed look in the two tools

5 comments about ASP, ADO, and XML Complete.

1. The most valueable book for beginner and yet so usefull for professionals and advance users. If you don't understand and weak in programming concepts, you will find difficulties to cope with it because it is so stright forward to the point and not explaining much like other book. Please don't buy this book, you would regret it, however if you are experince programer then you must buy it!



2. Save the famous tomes; this one actually comes in handy.

   Maybe it's just the size, look and feel of this little workhorse, or maybe it's because it feels like a super-thick pamphlet in your hands that you feel like you can treat in any way without regard to its physical condition, but somehow this book had surprised me my being so darn usable! I have rarely encountered a book that makes it so easy to get right to the subject you're trying to look up, get the facts/explanations you need... and get back to work. My pages are all dog-eared and highlighted. If you're a harried developer, I think you'll know the value of that.

   The premise of the book is simple: combine the good parts of other books into one. So Chapter 1, "The Microsoft Toolset" is lifted straight out of the "E-Commerce Developer's Guide" by Noel Jerke, Chapter 2 is "adapted" from "Visual Basic Developer's Guide to ASP and IIS" by A. Russell Jones, and so on.

   The surprising effect of all of this is that it's like having a research assistant who slogged through a mountain of material (useful and otherwise) for you and then handed you the highlights with post-it notes so you can save time. If one of those sources interests you, you can always read the book it came from. Or cast it aside and move on to the next piece.

   And as books go, it has a high percentage of lookup tables and code samples. Why? Because that's part of the "good stuff" worth "adapting" from the other books. This won't win any book awards, but it does get yanked off the shelf more often than most others.




3. I'm an experienced programmer with 10 years of VB Client/Server and new to the WEB. The WEB is maddeningly different. This book has provided me with THE road map of modern ASP development. It is well organized. Each chapter is well selected. The content of each chapter is such that the subject is adequately covered and I can always get the book from which the chapter is extracted if I want more information. As one commenter put it, its like getting the work product of a half dozen research assistants, each of whom sifted dozens of books.

   It is clearly aimed at the person who wants to understand the subject. There are no "To Create..." sequences that walk through the IDE to create a brain-dead and useless example so prevalent in the Microsoft programmer's guides. It assumes that the reader has a high school education, a keen mind and is willing to use both. Looking for a book that will do your thinking for you? This is not it. There are plenty of sample code snippets. They are there to give the reader working examples that augment the text.

   I anticipate keeping this book handy as a reference on WEB ASP assignments.

   There is a caveat for Microsoft oriented WEB developers. It does not address Visual Interdev. For that topic I recommend Wrox's "Beginning WEB Development with Visual Interdev 6."

   I should also mention that this book does not teach one how to program. There are other resources for that. It does teach relational database principles, SQL, ADO, XML, and how to use XML in Microsoft SQL Server. The crowning glory is an excellent "class project," a walk through Microsoft's Biz Talk application.




4. I ordered the book and read it. I think that the book is not good for any ASP programmer. First, it is not complete. For example, it didn't cover server.transfer, which is an excellent feature in ASP 3.0. Second, the description about ADO is so simple that I cannot get any idea about ADO.

   Why did I buy it? It is cheap and heavy. Another reason was the other users' review. Based on my experience, I suggest you to avoid this book as either study material or reference.




5. This is an outstanding book for ASP programmers ... It serves as a great reference source on a variety of topics. I have been very impressed with the depth and breadth of coverage (contrary to one of the reviews I read). Great value. It'll remain on my shelf for a long time.

5 comments about Doing Hard Time: Developing Real-Time Systems with UML, Objects, Frameworks, and Patterns (Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series).

1. Even though this book focuses on object-oriented software development for real-time systems, I am certain that it can serve as a valuable source of insight for all developers - including those working on systems outside the targeted area or using alternative approaches. It is very comprehensive and provides clearly written discussions on many subjects which are generally not properly treated in other software development texts. Examples of such topics are: frameworks, patterns, statecharts, threads, architectural design and safety requirements. The author's conversational style combined with effective use of humour ensure that reading the more than 700 pages of this book will not be regarded as "doing hard time" but rather as an enjoyable experience.



2. The book appears to be a testament to "why I am good" rather than a description of the topic at hand. Editorially, figures don't match text, grammar is expansive and lacks understandability, it is difficult to determine whether words used are used in their English or technical sense, and the use of words requiring dictionary lookup is laudable in grade schools somewhat suspect in a book of this caliber (try 'reify'). Technically little scholarship is shown. The section titles are good, the author often strays from them. For analysis of embedded systems, trivial results are stated and no attention is given to their derivation nor to analysis or references to analysis. Little attention is paid topics beyond their brief statement. Much time is wasted on examples which show the authors work engagements but which do not illustrate the point at hand. Critical topics (for embedded systems) need greater attention and technical analysis rather than restating obvious results and hand-waving (tasking, inter-task message passing, event disposition, etc). The employment of statecharts in situations that it is unsuited to is difficult to understand. The placement and analysis of statecharts within the context of UML, and the technical and organizational difficulties and advantages of statecharts within the context of UML need some discussion.

   The obvious needs discussion and scholarly treatment, analytical results, including mathematical formulas, and not restatement and explanation by (generally poor) example.

   A terrible, terrible book which needs scholarship for it's improvement. Full of pointless examples and lack of technical discussion.




3. I read this book as a first introduction to OO real time computing. I liked the introduction that covers the three topics of OO, RT systems and fault tolerance (though it does not connect the three topics in any sense). I gave up reading the book after the chapter on method, though I skipped through the remaining chapters. The rest of the book was mainly old stuff on waterfall models and OOA/OOD. The whole book was also very commercial and connected to a specific product from the company that the author works for. There was no comparison to other (in my opinion superior) methods and tools.

   Instead of buying this book I would recommend you to buy an established book on real time systems and an established book on OO. You will end up spending less money and get a better overview of the two fields by reading fewer pages.




4. I'd have to go along with the last 2 readers reviews. This book provides a brief summary of a lot of issues but provides no real substance. A lot of the examples just demonstrate the author's past experience with no explanation as to how you would apply them to your own. There are better books out there for designing systems with UML.



5. A fantastic description of how to apply UML and OO process to Embedded and Real-Time systems. Bruce does a great job of keeping the material informative and interesting with concrete "real world" examples. I especially enjoyed the discussion of process and which UML artifacts are used in what phase of development and why. This book has quickly become required reading in my organization. If you want a UML book that provides "how to" knowledge without the doctoral dissertation, then this is for you.

5 comments about Cocoon Developer's Handbook (Developer's Library).

1. I normaly spend my time cringing at the writing of computer science authors. This book is fairly straight forward. It skips a beat here and there, but not so much that it stops one dead in the tracks. It is an exhaustive read and only on the basics. I thought that more depth is eventually needed when Cocoon gets finalized, but this is about as good as it gets right now.



2. I'm using Cocoon, and i was looking for a good book to help me in developing XML based web sites.
   I buyed this book and i'm really satisfied. It is simple and complete. The book follows a well defined learning path. Some chapters, which analyzes advanced features in Cocoon(like SOAP, Internazionalization, ...), are extremely useful.



3. Sorry guys I know I should have wrote this one sooner. I went to a local bookstore here in Taipei and I bumped into someone who was buying this book. If only I could speak mandarin I would have told him that this book is simply OUTDATED because Cocoon has always been changing. It has never been, and may take a long time for it to be a full blown butterfly :)
   
   The book is great. It taught me a lot of stuff. Let us just say buying this book is like buying a book with a title "Mastering Windows 95 in one month".
   
   I am not going to preach on staying away as far as you can with Cocoon, not the book, even if it almost cost us our project but take a good, very good, look at the Table of Contents and see if the stuffs there are still supported by Cocoon. Or go to Cocoon website and decide on which stuff you would like to use (god bless you) and check if they are in this book.
   
   
   If I am to rate this book regardless of whether or not its updated, I will give it 5 star or even 6. It's a great book for academic engagement ONLY.



4. Unless you are using Cocoon 2.1.x or earlier, you are better off trying to learn from online tutorials or by asking questions at an online Cocoon forum. Relative to other Cocoon books available, this one is very good. Relative to 2008 and the release of Cocoon 2.2, this book is almost useless.



5. I did not find any other book which covers that much details.
   It good for the pros. and beginners alike. I like to see its second edition covering v2.2 coming out soon.
   The only drawback is the lack of CD but otherwise a must read for those who want to implement this web publishing framework.
   The service was good and I recieve the book in the exact quality as mentioned.
   Thanks

5 comments about XML Internationalization and Localization (Sams White Book).

1. At last! A book that addresses a key instructional and informational need in the localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) industries. To date, there is no single authoritative source on the subject of XML l10n and i18n, despite the fact that XML is a key driver behind the growth of the Internet, B2B, content management and large-scale data exchange and will be increasingly important in the future, and central to e-commerce and globalization in general.

   Up to now, most writings on XML, that I have seen, are generally non-l10n and i18n specific, and only make reference to these areas in passing, as part of a wider technological discussion. There is development information available on the Internet about XML standards, which includes sections on i18n, but this is divorced from any business logic or discussion on practical deployments within the localization industry. The best discussions I have seen on the possible applications of XML tend to be piecemeal, such as white papers or magazine articles in publications. This book changes all that.

   The structure is very good - comprehensive without being overwhelming and it is well thought out and illustrated with code samples and screen shots. Content ranges from a practical and clear education on XML technology, through to where XML i18n and l10n fits into the product development cycle, content authoring and localization processes. Central to the book's appeal is it's practicality and relevance to modern day industry developments such as XLIFF, ITS, online translation, translation memory use and even WML and Flash too! The book is aimed at doing, not at theorizing, and it fills a key gap in the market.

   Potential for this book’s influence is huge given the trends in business models and product/service deployment globally over the Internet. I think this book could become more important than Nadine Kano’s "Developing International Software for Windows 95 and NT". It should be on the bookshelf of every serious content development house NOW, nestling up to "The Lexus and The Olive Tree" (Thomas Friedman) and "Translating Into Success" (Robert C. Sprung, Eds.) as a well-thumbed, coffee-stained source of reference for anyone seriously interested in developing and maintaining a globalization presence.

   I would certainly recommend the book to all content developers, and translation tools development teams. I would envisage the book could be useful for content authors and developers of all types - DB architects, content managers, documentation writers, ML website developers, etc. Anyone who needs to develop, manage and maintain global content, which has to be localized and deployed in multiple languages.




2. This is a great book for the 'doers' in the product globalization technology fields. Well worth the money. Extremely credible combination of industry guru Yves Savourel's content with some additional flavoring of content from globalization expert Ultan O'Broin of Oracle Corporation provide a wide-ranging discourse on how to design, develop and build XML content that is multilingual and fully globalized and easily translated. For the first time we see the words "pseudo-translation" mentioned in a book at this level (please take note Nancy Kano et al) as well as the treatment of the localization process as a business activity (and not some kind of warm armpit partnership between developers and translators). Brilliant. I hope the book heralds a new departure in content creation and also attitudes in the internationalization and localization industry - it's badly needed. My only quibble is the lack of CD-ROM with example XML files that we might have used to evaluate our own XML tools and processes with to compare with the books findings.



3. Yves Savourel has a firm grasp of the technical aspects of XML development - completed by a wealt of experience in the product globalization arena. The writing style in XML internationalizaion and Localization is clear and unambiguous - easily understood by the novice and guru alike, and using terms that are familiar to anyone working in the internationalization and localization industries. The book's content is comprehensive with useful and practical examples, directly applicable to the real world. Thorough, interesting examination of one of critical development formats for entrprise, database and internet computing, the book is much needed! I hope there is more to come.



4. Yves Savourel's book on XML Internationalization and Localization is an excellent resource and definitely worth reading for anyone working with XML in an international environment.

   I found the first part of the book especially helpful, the second part is very focussed on translation processes, assuming that web content internationalization and localization occurs in a similar fashion to software product development, which is not necessarily the case. "XML Tools for Internationalization and Localization" might have been a more appropriate title.

   The comparison of translation tools is very long and difficult to read, with unnecessary screenshots showing all samples. A tabular overview on standards compliance and supported features, together with one set of testcases, would be sufficient. The XML database chapter, on the other hand, could be expanded with more information on native XML databases.

   Typographical conventions leave room for improvement, including the choice of fonts, indentation in structured example and the overuse of line continuation characters in places where line breaks are not significant.




5. This book was truly a pleasure to read. A good writing style, a lot of information, and a tight editing job that really makes both the messenger and the message look better. What more could a person ask for?

   XML is definitely out there, and it seems to be a lot more than just a buzzword. Finally there is a book that makes it seem more accessible to international markets.

   Well, not everything was perfect. But it was so much better than some of the other books out there, that it definitely deserves 4/5 stars.

No comments about The Calculus of Computation: Decision Procedures with Applications to Verification.

2 comments about Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 (Foundation).

1. "Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8" by Craig Grannell is a new title in the Foundation series from Friends of ED, a very impressive series of cutting-edge web-design books that mostly focuses on advanced design and programming techniques. The series is widely acclaimed for its no-nonsense, hands-on, thorough and thoroughly researched approach, with the backing of an outstanding user-to-user and author-to-user forum on its website.
   
   "Foundation Web Design for Dreamweaver 8" is a bit of an anomaly in the series. It's definitely not an advanced book, and it's not terribly thorough. It would make an excellent introduction to CSS and to Dreamweaver for an old HTML hand who's about to make the move to standards-compliant, WYSIWYG webpage design, but it's definitely not suitable for someone who has no idea what HTML looks like, and anyone who has any familiarity with any of Dreamweaver's recent versions is likely to find the material overly elementary.
   
   The editorial comments on the back cover of the book deride how "Most books about Dreamweaver are massive tomes that go through every menu option in painstaking detail." This book definitely is not massive -- it's just over 300 pages including the index, many unnecessary (and unnecessarily oversized) screenshots, and way too much whitespace at the bottoms of pages when an inline screenshot flows to the next page -- and it certainly doesn't go through every menu option. Indeed, many of the options aren't mentioned at all, with examples often telling you something on the order of "click A, enter B in the C box, select option D, hit OK" or "the default settings are fine" without really explaining what it all means. There are, for example, screenshots of all of Dreamweaver's insert bars spread out over three pages, but none of the dozens of individual icons on these bars is labeled or described.
   
   For someone just getting his feet wet with Dreamweaver, this may be a great approach. After all, there's too much functionality in Dreamweaver to bother with all the little details on the first day out, and learning by doing is a great way to start. But the book is too basic to live up to the promise on the back cover of building anything "cutting-edge."
   
   One thing very nice about the book is what the author calls its "modular nature." Because the author provides numerous, progressive versions of each example file (easily downloadable from the Friends of ED website), the reader can pick up any example at any point along the way with a fresh, correct copy of the necessary files as they should exist at that point in development process.
   
   Like the other books in the Foundation series, the main font (Andale Sans) is easy to read, the paper stock is heavy and bright, and the few snippets of code are well-formated and clear. For some reason, however, the publishers chose a similar sans-serif font (Optima) for setting field names and dialog-box titles, for example, and since the book is printed in one color (black), it's hard to tell what's what. Also strange is that all of the text, background, and image colors in the sample websites are shades of grey -- even in the downloadable files. (I suppose the author didn't want people to appropriate his very nice designs for their own sites -- and with everything looking like something out of an old Bette Davis picture, there's no worry anyone will!)
   
   So in summary, I can recommend this book for the Dreamweaver beginner who is already familiar enough with HTML to create a minimally complex webpage from scratch but who needs to be "shown around" Dreamweaver and who needs a gentle introduction to CSS. In the old days, software used to come packaged with two manuals: a thinner book called "Getting Started" that walked you through a program's main features mostly by example, and a thicker book called "User Guide" that gave every detail of every option of every feature. If you're looking for a "User Guide," this isn't it. But if you wish you had a basic "Getting Started" book for Dreamweaver, then look no further. This is it.



2. While I thought the book "Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Complete Concepts and Techniques (Shelly Cashman Series)" was a wonderful book for someone with no prior experience with Dreamweaver, this book took me to the next level with a more professional focus on web development and an emphasis on Cascading Style Sheets.
   Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 not only shows you how to do something, it shows you the best way to do it and why. It is filled with tips and minor hacks that will help you address problems you may encounter when designing a web site. Although this is not a book on CSS, there is definitely an emphasis on CSS. By the end of the book, you will have used all kinds of CSS selectors: Tag, Class, ID and Grouped selectors. This book has many tutorials, including creating a gallery, using floated content and creating a liquid layout with sidebars, creating navigation bars with rollover images, and much much much more.
   This book has black and white photos. Although I am a big fan of color, it really didn't make a difference having the photos in black and white in this case. It does not come with a disk, instead you go to the publisher's web site to download the files you will need for the tutorials.

3 comments about Model Checking.

1. This book is horribly difficult to read, it is very terse. I found that I could easily follow the things I knew already, but it is not a good book to learn new things from. It is a collection of research results, in a sensible order, but little effort has been made to explain things to the novice. In fact there are research papers which introduce more advanced topics than covered here, and are much easier to read than this book (for example Alur's paper on ATL). It is probably good as a comprehensive reference if you are already familiar with the techniques. It is a shame as there seems to be no other comprehensive book available on model checking. The most accessible introduction remains Manna and Pnueli's "Temporal Verification of Reactive Systems", although it only has one chapter on model checking.



2. Clarke's book is going to be a classic in this area of computer science. It is well written and covers just about exactly what one would want in a book on this topic. I am currently re-reading chapters 9 and 10 for more depth of understanding, because at first I was able to get the general idea just by skimming, and it is technical enough in style to satisfy my mathematical needs.
   
   I highly recommend this book as a great source on the topic and history of model checking.



3. This is one of the more comprehensive references on model checking. It covers most of the main technqiues used in model checking. It does not cover bounded model checking which became popular after the publication of this book.
   
   The writing style and the explanations in the book could be much better. You just need some patience in reading the book. Overall, I think this book is a useful reference to researchers and practitioners in the field.
   
   This book, however, is NOT for some one who is new to the field. For those who are new to Model Checking and Formal Verification, I strongly recommend "Introduction to Formal Hardware Verification" by Thomas Kropf.

3 comments about Object-Oriented Programming via Fortran 90/95.

1. This is a great book for any Fortran programmer (new and old). The author does a fantastic job of introducing OOP for Fortran 90/95. I had no idea that all kinds of neat OO concepts could be implemented in Fortran. I almost want to go back and rewrite my big FEA code using these concepts.

   What I like most is that the author contrasts implementation details between Fortran, C++, and MATLAB to futher enrich the topics being discussed. Obviously, with this style, the author knows his audience (engineers and scientists).

   I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK!




2. This book requires that the reader already knows about object-oriented programming. It gives little information on the subject. Instead, it gives details about how to use Fortran to implement those concepts. The details it gives will already be familiar to Fortran users, though not for that purpose. I was hoping for a book for the many scientists and engineers who have learned and used Fortran well, but who have not learned about object-oriented methods. This book isn't it. The only audience for which it is useful is the opposite: an experienced object-oriented programmer who wishes to switch from another language to Fortran.

   The above occupies about a third of the book. Another third consists of elementary material that is not particularly relevant even to that audience, such as memory management, linked lists, and linear algebra. Object orientation is mentioned only peripherally in that material.

   The last third consists of appendices that are mostly padding. There are language tables that are available in the manual with any compiler, and source code which repeats with variations examples in the main text.




3. This book is quite nice for the spoiled programmer who has been using a modern OO language such as C++ or python, and demonstrates methods to implement OO concepts as classes, overloading and polymorphism in Fortran 90/95 (F9X in the remainder of this review)
   
   This however is also its main weakness: Even though F9X can be forced into these concepts, using those concepts, especially the proposed polymorphism method, is a tedious task, and makes a lot of the magic of OO programming disappear.
   
   What is lacking in this book is an explicit overview of concepts which cannot be implemented easily in F9X, such as destructors, interfaces and inheritance, as that might be reason enough to forget about trying to implement your program in F9X.
   
   My main conclusion after reading this is that trying to do OO in F9X is incomplete and way too much trouble, and thus the need for this book is rather limited.

No comments about Pro Visual Studio 2005 Team System Application Development (Pro).