Computing Internet Books

Still reading this but....
Seems to lack the 'meat' and depth of information of the Access Developers Handbook series (of which no edition for Access 2007 seems to exist).
Product shipped without the accompanying CD that is referred to throughout the text.

I've read Alison Balters entire series of Access book more than twice each. She writes in a clear style which gets right to the point. When Access 2007 came out,I immediately ordered Alison Balters book. It helped me to get up to speed on Access 2007 and was money well spent. I would also recommend reading Access 2007 VBA published by Wrox after reading Alison's book.

As is already known, Access 2007 has a new interface, with ribbons and many new features targeted mainly to the end-user. The DEVELOPMENT process however, has not changed much. This book presents a brief introduction of what is new in Access 2007, and then goes on to present the "development" part. Alison Balter, as in her previous books on Access Development, presents the right combination of theory and code (VBA, ADO, etc). The chapters on objects/properties/methods/events, advanced form techniques, advanced report techniques, advanced query techniques, advanced VBA techniques, and ActiveX Data Objects, to name a few, are excellent. Some chapters have been appropriately revised, some others have been completely rewritten or are new -database security, and customizing ribbons, for example. However, there is no longer coverage of DAO, and because of the new interface, the coverage of startup options is gone. I have downloaded the book examples and source code, naming conventions (appendix A) and table structures (appendix B) without any problem. Of course, having these, you no longer need the CD. This book is outstanding; as in the past, the technical editing is excellent and the content is superb. I expect nothing less from the terrific author Alison Balter.

I have found this book extremley helpful and like the others i was missing the cd from the book This however was easily rectified by emailing alison directly to resolve this issue of which she was extremely helpful with. On that note i believe that is more an Amazon issue as I have bough an earlier version of this same book from another source and did get the cd with it.

Very well written (as are all of Alison Balter's Access books), very clear and easy to follow.

Diane Teare does a great job of providing necessary information and case studies to a networking professional wanting to get into the network design field. This is an associate level certification and thusly the information provided is spoon-fed to what is considered a design associate or below design associate-level person with a CCNA certification. The information is a bit wordy, but I think it lends well to learning the material and is relevant to every situation where something is repeated.

The cases are a great way to practice the theory you've learned in the chapters. Overall, a great book on Cisco network design theory. A+.

I ordered this book with high hopes of being shown some things that I hadn't thought of in the past. I read this book with disgust. You would think a book like this, for a course titled "design," would have some quality information. I was expecting to read more on personal experiences of experts and cisco best practices, possibly some in depth configurations for designing efficiency in to key parts of the network.

NOPE. This book is strictly a theoretical writing. It is for people who are going to be giving presentations with big pretty pictures of an ideal campus design. I'll be honest... I gave up half way through and just thumbed through the second half. I did this, because after 400 pages of reading, the only commands shown in the book were "show processes" and "service timestamps." ARE YOU KIDDING? A CCNA with any experience should be able to write this in their sleep. Everything in this book is common sense.

If I ever have to work with someone boasting their CCDA, I'm dubbing them useless and placing them in the corner.

I really have some difficulty with this book. I have a lot of network design experience and a CCNA, but I need to learn the "Cisco way" of network design. This book is 930 pages long, but I think with a little effort the information within it could have been condensed into under 100 pages. there's so much to read to get to the meat of the subject. And when I look back at the pages I earmared for re-reading later, there are many pages each with just a small amount of info I want to go over again before the exam.

In at least one case, each bullet point in a list was a paragraph long, and the summary at the end of the bullet list was simply a repeat of the last bullet point. It seems that there was a concious effort to "pad out" the book.

The book does not cover all the information needed to pass this intro-level course in design (it refers you out to texts for the next level course up: eg. Building Cisco Multilayer Switch Networks). To my mind, one should not have to purchase reference material for the advanced courses in order to be able to get through the introductory courses.

All in all an overly-hard read and, at times it seems, more focussed on advertising Cisco product and positioning Cisco as a locked-in solution than on helping one through the CCDA exam.

After 570 pages of text, I have little clue as to what kinds of questions will be on the exam to come (at least in terms of the design questions).

I am a college student taking a class using this book to help in creating web pages. We have found errors in the book. In some of the review work and case probems it tells you do certain thing that the book never told you how to do it. I would do more research before I bought this book.

The "Includes XHTL coverage throughout" claim on the front cover and the publisher's review is misleading. VERY misleading. While the coverage of the book is well thought out and implemented, the author does NOT use xhtml throughout, proper coverage of xhtml is relegated to a single appendix. The xhtml is what I would call "pseudo-covered" in the rest of the book. For example, proper xhtml requires the use of an xml declarative statement and a DOCTYPE, among other things. The author leaves these out in almost every example. He gets some stuff right like the br / for an xhtml break tag and then totally blows the rest. As an example onMouseOver as an event handler will NOT validate as proper xhtml 1.0 Strict or xhtml 1.1 because xhtml requires all tags and attributes to be totally lowercase and yet the author uses it (among numerous other errors.) If you're going to claim something as teaching xhtml, then you should get it right. If you are learning from this book - great. You'll get a very good foundation. But be aware that Mr. Carey is also teaching you some things that are incorrect. Make sure you validate the scripts at the w3c validator as xhtml 1.1 or xhtml 1.0 strict and you'll see what I mean.

I didn't have to learn HTML toward my degree, but I thought it would be a good idea to know it a little. I went to the library and this was the only updated book on HTML and I just picked it. I loved it!!! It is VERY comprehensive, very easy to follow, assignments are interesting. With this book you can study HTML on your own, no need to have an instructor! It has a good introduction to CSS and JavaScript. Main ides are emphasized in tables, lots of helpful illustrations. Very helpful appendices at the end of the book. Recommended!!

Like other reviewers, I've used this book in a community college class, and, like the others, find the book does a good job by itself! The example tutorials are easy to follow (although the examples are kind of drab!), additional reference information is included, and being in color definitely helps. I've used this book as a reference when customizing public layouts for my own use. I would say the book is more of a "valiant attempt" at Javascript, which would require a book in itself. Likewise, I was surprised at how often the CSS section didn't help me with some CSS code I was modifying. And I'll add that, of the web technologies out there, you're better off learning Javascript and PHP than DHTML. Not the best HTML book, but definitely a good one.

This book was used at the local Community College as the text book for an HTML class. I thought the book did a great job of incorporating what the reader learns into real web pages. Other books just say to make text bold do this, to make a marquee do that, but the don't show you how to put that into practice. The reader can do the cases at the end of every chapter and get a solid understanding of how to really use what they've learned. I know it doesn't cover every tag you can use, but gives you a great understanding of the basics.

Hi

This is to the authors of this book:
Since I bought this book a few months ago and it is a good book for version 6.1

However, with 7.0 available...could you tell about your plans for an upgrade chapter/electronic chapters for those of us who actually need to catch up on 7.0 ?

If a book becomes obsolete (may be not the right word here - but meaning a book deals with older technology) this quickly....would you support your readers?

Thanks
Ravi

If you prefer print version of the online documentation here it is. Unfortunately, not much content in addition to that online component. Provides a solid introduction to weblogic and j2ee, although does not go into depth in any particular topic.

This book is certainly good. Very detailed. And it is cool.
But mind you this for Weblogic 7.0. and NOT 8.1.

And another thing is that the errata is not available for this book anywhere and there are some mistakes in the text/code.

If you are new to WebLogic and/or are somewhat mystified by J2EE buy this book. It's a great resource and it is totally worth the money. It helps you get up and running quickly without getting too bogged down in all the BEA documentation. I found the overview of the J2EE technologies very enriching and the demonstration of WebLogic's value proposition and capabilities easy to digest. It also has some very helpful and practical suggestions for working out some thorny issues with WebLogic server such as class loaders, deployment etc. I'm constantly referring to it. The author has really done his homework and has done a valuable service to the WebLogic developer community by writing this book. When I had a question regarding some portions of the text I emailed the author and he responded within hours! He not only helped answer my question but also pointed me in the right direction where I could do additional research. It's nice to see someone stand by their work like that.

like so many computer books, this is about 4 pounds of stuffing: w2k screen shots, very simple j2ee code examples, &c. if you want to learn EJB, get a real EJB book like Monson-Haefel (0-596-00226-2). for weblogic, stick to online docs.

Very good book to get started with VC#
The book was a little to slow in the first 2 parts

This book available in Online Reader form. I don't reccomend it. The viewer gets stuck, skips pages (requires restaring the browser) and even submitting a bug report generates a response from Amazon that "There is an error...".

Biggest problem with this book is the online reader lets you zoom in only 1 time which makes reading the example code impossible.

I have been programming for a very long time with a lot of VB6 experience. Before that I came from VB3, Delphi 1 and Clipper. I didn't need the programming aspect, I just needed to get acquainted with the C# syntax and the VS2005 IDE.

This book is well organized and easy to follow. It delves deep enough into each main area far enough to show you what to do and where to look for more information. Being a guitar player myself, I also enjoyed the fact that there were guitars, amps and pedals used as .jpg examples!

No complaints here!

I have started learning programming about 6 months ago, reading several books. All the books have been on different programming languages at a beginners level.
This book is definitely geared towards someone that wants to learn programming with Visual C#. I think this book is one of the best I have ever read. I am finding myself wanting to pick this book up and continue learning.

I would totally suggest this book to anyone.
Great Book!!

This product did not deliver after all the good reviews I read on amazon. The book is clearly translated from the visual basic equivalent, as a result certain exercises have hints that are putting you on the wrong foot and dont make any sense at all. The book left me with alot of questions especially on the syntax of the language, and frustrated me with its lack of providing insight on what I was doing.

The Unleashed series is for Advanced users and System Administrators, so this book is a shining example of that series. Covering aspects from a real-world perspective, the authors have captured what it's like to really use Project Server and how to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of the software.

This book isn't afraid to go "under the hood" and really get into the meat of the software, allowing users to get the most out of the book and the server.

With a wide variety of authors, this is an excellent resource no SysAdmin using Project Server should be without.

This work contains over 800 pages of densly packed information. However at least 600 of those pages are directed towards system administrators who are implementing MS Project Server, not towards Project Managers who wish to use the tool.

I purchased the book thinking it would help me use features such as Project Analyzer, Project Center, etc. Less than 140 pages are oriented towards the user. Those pages that are directed towards users describe each feature in detail, but don't present them in the context that a project manager would find appealing. For example, what I would like to know is: "What are the top five views that would most enable a Project Manager to get a better grasp on how the project is doing?" You won't find the information presented in that context.

I bought this book hoping to learn MS Project Server workflow from a functional utilization perspective. While the book covers the features, it fails miserably to connecting the dots in a clear manner. This has diminished this book to a reference guide. In the next edition, take note. Make the security model more clear. Make the portfolio feature more clear, etc., etc., etc.

I have worked with many epm tools in a similar manner as a field consultant and this book as written for MS Project Server does not advance the practice.

On a brighter note, you have a strong foundation, wear the shoes of a PMO leader to gain better understanding of what content is required in your next edition.

Overall, I was very impressed by Tom's book. If you use Joomla to run your personal blog, you might not need it, although the early chapters help explain a great deal about basic site security.

However, the real target of the book is larger businesses for whom a site outage will hit income hard. If you're using Joomla in a corporate / enterprise environment and don't have a thorough back-up plan, this book will give you a jump-start.

This book is light on content, with little or no valuable information and in many cases only referenced to third party web sites. It has very little on Joomla and is full of 'filler' white space and generic risk management type forms - most of which are not relevant. It even gives you a form for how to take your backup CD/Tape to the fireproof storage area!! Has this guy even heard of the Internet? Don't waste your money - I did.

I have been a web designer for many years. But I had never thought too deeply about security and getting hacked until a lot of my friends started experiencing those problems. I got nervous and read everything that I could on the net to try to make my site more secure. However, I NEVER thought about what I would do if the bad guys ever got in anyway. This book SERIOUSLY WOKE ME UP! This book makes you develop an action plan in case you are attacked. Setting up your site is one thing but having a plan in place to get it back was something I never thought of until I read this book. Dodging the Bullets is just that! When the bullets are flying your way, what are you going to do to keep from getting hit in your vital organs? Thanks Tom.

If you have a website, then security should be a consideration during its development. Dodging the Bullets is a very useful reference for webmasters grappling with the security of their Joomla powered site.

For smaller sites, the book does a great job at explaining two important aspects of making your site secure, the all important htaccess file and folder and file permissions.

For sites of larger organizations, the book really comes into its own. Many of the later chapters deal with the process of setting up protocols within your organization to ensure stability of your site. Forms are usefully provided to help webmasters document and distribute the responsibility of uptime.

For any webmaster of a Joomla site for a larger organization, such as a school or municipality, Dodging the Bullets is an important bookshelf reference.

If you enjoy acres of whitespace and lotsa forms that you can photocopy and fill out to track such things as where your backups are stored this might be the book for you. Or if you don't do backups this book might get you started. By page 13 I was thinking "Come on already!"

I would guess that perhaps 90% of the pages are dedicated a general description of how important it is to do a professional job of protecting a website site, making and testing backups, and so on. These are all good things to know, but if you know them already and are interested in securing a Joomla! Site you will learn little here that you can't online. There are LOTS of forms to copy and fill out.

That said I learned a trick or two and put Post-its on a half-dozen pages, having mostly to do with permissions settings, so there is value in there, you just need to dig quite a bit.

I was thrilled to find the title, not so thrilled to read the book. A little like expecting Haggan Das and biting into low cal nonfat frozen yogurt.

There are errors throughout the tutorials, and several are major enough to halt the process of the design. That would be forgivable...IF there was an errata or the needed files on the publisher's site, but they give no support! Users have been asking for these fixes since June of 2006!

If I would have known this I never would have purchased this book. The potential is there, but the oversight and support are not.

Sorry but i'm writing in Italian:
Il libro non è male, focalizzato soprattutto sul disegno dell'interfaccia e tecniche per il passaggio da Illustrator a Flash. Non si capisce molto bene se è un libro teorico o tecnico, dato che tocca entrambi gli aspetti senza però approfondire abbastanza nessuno dei due. Molto interessanti le prime sezioni e la parte su Flash Video, mentre c'è qualche parte che di Advanced non ha nulla (esempio: la parte in cui ti spiega come usare la Penna di Illustrator...e le parti di ActionScript sono poche e veramente a Level Begginer)
Vale comunque il suo prezzo

AdvancED Flash Interface Design is the latest installment from Friends of ED. Incidentally, while reading an interview with Chris Mills, I recently learned that the ED in the title is capitalized for a reason. "Friends of Every Designer" is what the company name stands for. Read blogs folks, you'll have many serendipitous moments. Anyway, this book was very practical, filled with an enormous amount of information, all of which is very applicable on a day to day basis. This quote from Chris' blog sums it up quite nicely...

"You know those tech books you read and go 'yeah, this is all well and good, but would I ever REALLY do any of this in my work?' Well, this book isn't like that - it's nothing but real-world Flash design teachings for those of you who have already got past the basics, but want to take your work further, with creative, inspirational techniques."

Since my official job description is Web User Interface Designer / Developer, I figured it would be right up my alley. I chimed in with a comment on his blog post regarding this book, and he was nice enough to send me a review copy. It was written by a trio of talented Flash guys: Michael Kemper, Guido Rosso and Brian Monnone. What I like is that while this series is geared towards Flash, it covers fundamentals that are essential to any sort of visual or graphic design.

Like any book, it starts with an overview of the topic, pointing out some of the benefits of Flash, while also acknowledging a few of its drawbacks. They are quick to point out that long loading times and inaccessible content are a stigma which Flash is helping to overcome. Loading times can be avoided through smart planning of content (ala Ajax, loading things as needed) and Flash can actually be used to add sub-titles to video and such.

Chapters two through five focus on user experience, color theory, interface design and vector drawing. The content therein could be used for a design class as a textbook. Seriously, it's that good. Also, I like the way the book is planned out. Most of it is black and white, with figures that are contained in a color section. This is a great compromise between keeping printing costs low, while not missing out on some design nuance, because there are color pages too.

Chapters six and seven delve more into the Flash interface itself, covering advanced uses of the timeline and layers, and showing how to use Flash for vector drawing. In the past, these tools were considered to be sub-par, but as of version 8 it has really come into its own for creating non-destructive effects. These same effects can also be manipulated, created and removed with ActionScript. It should be noted that there is also a fair bit of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop techniques covered, throughout the entirety of the book.

Chapter 8 was a departure into the realm of video, talking about the various codecs that can be used. It also showed how to do green screen effects with Apple Final Cut Pro. Once you have isolated the video clips you want to make use of, they can then be taken into the Flash environment for seamless integration with your site's interface. Think of Adobe's own site, which has many full-motion video narrators who walk you through their varying content.

While Flash's forte is vectors, occasionally you will find yourself needing pixel-precision. Chapters 9 and 10 are about achieving this with Photoshop, and how to make raster (bitmap) images with the smallest footprints. This is usually done by exporting PNG files with the correct amount of compression and opacity. One of the nice things about Flash is that IE6 has no problem rendering PNG opacity when used in conjunction with Flash. Many of you CSS guys will know what a headache this is to do otherwise, using inelegant GIF files.

The last few chapters cover creating animated effects, Flash textures, and finishing off a site. They cover some nice tweening and transformation effects, and also show how to make water textures with distortion filters and a background image. If you've seen water in games like Unreal Tournament, you will know what I'm talking about. The final chapter covers attention to detail that will make the difference between good work and great work. It teaches how to sweat the small stuff, without being too much of a perfectionist.

My one and only complaint is that this book focused so heavily on Illustrator, when Fireworks is perhaps a more seamlessly integrated tool, and many people who have purchased Studio 8 for Flash and Dreamweaver already have it bundled. Nevertheless, many of the concepts carry over to whatever graphics program you prefer. All in all, this is a very strong title and a must-have for those who do a lot of cross-disciplinary work or just want to branch out into another aspect of web design. I like to think of Flash as SWAT - You don't call `em in for just anything, but it's great when you really need high impact.

I may be exagerating, but from the moment i bought this book i realized that the "advanced" part was easy for everyone to follow and put into good use.

I'm no big graphic designer nor a person usually capable of reading complicated books, and i usually get bored after the first few chapters. but this book is written differently, it's as clear and straight forward as if someone was actually there explaining to you how to drastically improve your basic flash techniques and give you that extra something to really make a site worth seeing.

it's as if the authors were giving away all their deepest secrets and techniques while writing this book. and on top of that, i have to repeat myself, it's as simple as reading a fairy tale and again learning comes almost naturally.

i suggest you try out this book just after you have understood how flash works, no matter if you're a flash guru or someone that builds sites just for a hobby, it takes no skill at all to learn it, a little time to read it, and just a few moments to impress everyone with your new web designing skills.

there are few books around like this, and it would be a real shame to buy complicated foggy and extra long books when you have a designer bible right here.

When i first got this book, I didn't really know what to expect. I didn't know if it was going to be a design book or an animation book for interfaces. I guess what I eventually ended up getting was a little bit of both.

The early chapters of the book are definitely not "AdvancED", but give some good insight on some topics that are normally overlooked. The one problem with this book is that it was trying to fit information about a lot of combined programs, such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. However, this HAS to be done because of the way Flash interfaces are designed these days, so as a downfall it can be excused because sometimes it is unavoidable (and sometimes very handy) to know how to use all those programs.

There is a chapter on colors which is great, but the end of the chapter (page 56) talks about the Color class. The Color class is deprecated as of Flash 8 and I wish they would have went more in depth on using the new classes in 8, such as ColorTransform and the likes.

Now that we've got the negatives out of the way, it's time to cover all the very formidable positives that this book has to offer. It has great explanations in every chapter of how to deal with good user experience and interface design. It's obvious that the authors (award winners in this subject) know what they are talking about. For instance, on a personal level, I hate bringing in graphics into Flash from Illustrator and seeing all the miscellaneous graphic symbols that it makes while importing. Some people don't clean this up in the library and it's VERY frustrating to see all those symbols and have to go in and clean them up. These guys stress highly the importance of a clean library and have a great section in chapter 7 that shows how to clean these graphics up. I can't tell you how many times I'd wished that people who work with me could make nice, clean libraries before they hand files over to me, but sometimes thats too much to ask for.

There is a chapter that makes mention of video and the best part about this chapter, after having recently made a project for AT&T that used Flash video, is the fact that it makes mention of the Flash 8 Video Encoder that comes bundled with Flash 8 Professional. It's a stand alone application and nobody in my office actually knew what it was or how to use it (which for a large company such as I work for could be a bit mind boggling). They take you through the encoder and show you example usage, which is VERY handy when working with encoding FLV files. This chapter also boasts a great explanation (which I actually wish I had read before looking like a fool in an initial project meeting) of the video playback options that Flash has to offer (Streaming, Progressive, and Embedded video).

The middle of the book has a great color pullout (it's not really a pullout, but ya know...) that demonstrates examples from the book and coincides with the color chapter (since obviously you want to see colors in a color chapter...). Chapter 9 is also an outstanding chapter which takes you from start to finish on how to design an interface in Photoshop (and 10 follows up with the proper way to import it into Flash so that you can work with those graphics). There is a section in this chapter titled "Moving from Photoshop to Flash" (pg. 232) which is a HUGE bonus. EVERYONE in the world who is a Flash designer/developer should convert graphics in the way that is described in this section. It saves a lot of time and headaches later on when you use the process outlined here.

Overall, the book was a treat. It started off a bit slow but definitely picked up a lot of momentum by the end. I'd definitely recommend it to someone who normally takes graphics from programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop and brings them into Flash. Conversely, I'd recommend it to designers who design for Flash developers as there is a lot of good information to learn from here.

Simple, straightforward and easy to follow.
An excellent step by step guide, and a good reference manual.

I found this book to be a godsend win I first started using SharePoint at work. It's small and easily tabbable. This book will get you off and running with SharePoint and how to use it. I recommend this book to all new personnel who come to my work. Great starter book.

The book is very simple and does not bring much information on share point. Maybe it is just outdated.
I read it maybe a year ago and back then I didn't like the book.
You can read it in an hour, if that helps.

This book is good if you want an overview of sharepoint. Do you need a deeper knowledge you have to look elsewhere.
The book is well written, with focus on getting through most of the subjects of sharepoint 2003.
Today it might be a little out of date, as the new sharepoint 2007 is available.

What the heck is Sharepoint? We bought this book to help us find out. I've liked many of the SAMS 24-hour and 21-day books, but this is the first 10-minute SAMS that I enjoyed. This book has a 2005 copyright and addresses Sharepoint 2003, the release prceding the current Sharepoint 2007. Since the book is an introduction, it serves well even if you envision a Sharepoint 2007 environment.

As we reengineered our IT resources at our small technology company to run on Microsoft Small Business Server, we almost discarded the built-in Sharepoint-based CompanyWeb intranet. Just in time, we (I and one other experienced administrator/developer) took a closer look by rapidly exploring CompanyWeb using the twenty-five, ten-minute lessons in this book. Wow, we realized we could do so much with Sharepoint to improve our intranet. We quickly invested in four thicker Sharepoint books, but this is the book we will give to end users who are looking for something beyond read-only access to the documents and lists.

We learned that Sharepoint quite simply is a Microsoft server technology with an impressive set of tools for creating, viewing, and editing intranets. (Call them "portals" if they are comprehensive and well designed.) Sharepoint works just fine too for public web sites but so far has been promoted by Microsoft largely as a way to share Office 2003 and Office 2007 documents.

Use of Sharepoint encourages and almost ensures best practices for not just sharing but also collaborating on documents, lists (including contacts), discussions, surveys, links, and many more intranet elements. A wide variety of templates are available from Microsoft and others. Each of these intranet elements is a Sharepoint Web Part. Web Parts are enhanced ASP.Net pages with integrated assemblies of controls. The assemblies have properties and methods that permit easy runtime modification of content, format, and views by end users - in almost the same manner as end users can edit, format, and view Word or Excel documents. Most Sharepoint documents and other items can be automatically maintained in SQL Server databases (with version control and checkout if you need them) so you can say goodbye to huge assortments of poorly organized folders that are typically found in intranets, and this improvement in content management greatly eases an intranet administrator's burden.

Of course developers can build their own web parts using the sophistication of Visual Studio and all the power of the .NET Framework.