Computing Internet Books

If you want to have sophisticated webpages without using Net Framework 2 or 3, then this book is a must. I highly recommend it.

I bought this book as a complete reference to the javascript/jscript language. Instead I got a much to broad beginner's guide. The index is lousy, which makes it even worse as a reference, and server side javascript is mostly ignored.
If you want a javascript beginner's guides, sure you can go for this one, but it is definitely not for advanced programmers, it hasn't helped me solve one single problem.

This book does not cover the details of most of the Javascript objects. The examples are good enough for beginners who are just getting to know javascript.

Mastering Javascript is an excellent book for a newcomer to JavaScript, but I find that its value for updating my previous knowledge of JavaScript was much less than I expected. The book is a hefty 1100+ pages, and they avoid providing beginner's information on HTML, thankfully. Yet the language in the book is somewhat dry, even considering normal standards of writing in similar style books.

The book is good for those who already have a background in programming, and are interested in venturing into JavaScript. There are extended JavaScript examples in the book, and sample code is provided on a companion CD.

A very appreciated section on XML is included, and this was the section I focused on the most. Yet it doesn't develop it as much as I would have expected it to, considering how much it had already done with previous topics.

All in all, I would have enjoyed it more if this had been my first introduction to JavaScript. As is, it is still a good ride, though not as satisfying the second time around.

I'm about half way through the book and I find that is very informative, easy to follow. The one think I don't like is that it is focused on older browser development for Navigator 3. But I would definetly recomend this book to others.

I give this book 5 stars for the methodology (GUIDS) used alone. I think I can use that in my work. The chapter on interface layer is also good, but might confuse a beginner vb.net programmer. Overall the book is great, however, the chapter on business layer is not what i have expected. It delved on interfaces and state management of object for most of the chapter, but seems to be getting nowhere with the sample. I will have to read the chapter again to understand it fully, as I got lost in the process. I was actually expecting object collaboration on this chapter, but that was left out, so what's really the purpose of business layer chapter then? I will not recommend this book to novice programmers. For a much better discussion on object-oriented approach with clear explanation on 3-tier from the ground up, I highly recommend Dan Clark's Beginning Object-Oriented Programming using VB2005 book.

I have been using Ms. Kurata's book at work in making the transition from VB 6.0 to Visual Basic 2005. I find her explanations easy to understand and her examples immediately relevant to the work I am doing. I have a library of reference books on the subject, but lately I have found myself regularly referring to this book to quickly jog my memory on topics such as creating property statements and custom event handlers. This book packs a lot of knowledge into a well-written concise package.

Ms. Kurata's book is similar to Tim Patrick's book, which is another of my recent favorites that I also recommend.
Start-to-Finish Visual Basic 2005: Learn Visual Basic 2005 as You Design and Develop a Complete Application (The Addison-Wesley Microsoft Technology Series)

After searching long and hard for a book about business objects and databinding, I stumbled across this one. It gives you a good starting point and makes you think in a Object Orientated way. Lots of reuseable code and the presentation was good. I like a book that you can read and do a project at the same time.

However, I thought the book ended abruptly and left things a little undone. Furthermore, I would of liked it to go into more detail on sorting and filter business objects since this is a major issue.

In all, this was a great buy and I'll be referencing it for a while.

**** 4 Stars for Deborah Kurata ****

This book accomplishes a few useful things:

First of all, this book teaches you Object-Oriented development concepts, such as what Object-Oriented programming is, the basic elements of Object-Oriented architecture, and the benefits of using an Object-Oriented approach.

It also teaches you how to design software using the GUIDS Methodology: Goal-centered design (includes use cases, scenarios, business object identification, and domain model), User Interface design, Implementation-Centered design, Data design, and Strategies for construction.

Additionally, this book teaches you how to implement N-Tier architecture in an application, and explains its benefits. The N-Tier approach in this book is comprised of a Presentation Layer, Business Layer and a Data Access Layer.

A downside to this book is that it leaves you short of having a fully functional application, supporting record sorting and filtering, which, in my opinion, is a fundamental element of data presentation.


Additional Comments:

Being an ADO.NET proponent, and competent in extending ADO.NET, I found the OOP approach demonstrated in this book to be (frankly) a lot of work. A lot of the code that goes into this approach can be significantly reduced using ADO.NET. Furthermore, ADO.NET requires much less time to become proficient in, and faster to develop.

Here's a simple example that creates a Customer Class:

Public Class Customer


Public Sub New(ByVal customerName As String)

Me.Name = customerName

End Sub


Private m_Name As String
Public Property Name() As String

Get

Return m_Name

End Get

Set(ByVal value As String)

m_Name = value

End Set

End Property


End Class


A customer can be created like this:

Dim c As New Customer("Chili's Grill & Bar")


Now, how do you get a list of Customers? You have to use List(Of Type):

'Create a list
Dim customerList As New List(Of Customer)

'Add Customers
customerList.Add(New Customer("Chili's Grill & Bar"))
customerList.Add(New Customer("Dickey's BBQ Pit"))
customerList.Add(New Customer("La Hacienda Ranch"))


My Next question is, How do you handle sorting in a List(Of Type)? You may be tempted to, Well, Sort() of course!

customerList.Sort()

However, if you did not implement the IComparable interface in the Customer class, then you cannot use the Sort method... Any other ideas?


Now, what about filtering? How do you filter a List(Of Type)?

...


Put it this way, if you want to be able to bind the list to a control, like a DataGridView, and then have the list sorted when a DataGridViewColumn header is clicked, then you need to do some programming to implement the IBindingList interface. And then what if you want to do advanced sorting and filtering? You need to implement the IBindingListView... That's quite a bit of programming!


But life is MUCH easier with ADO.NET!

'ADO.NET (Create a Customer table and add a Name column)
Dim table As New DataTable("Customer")
table.Columns.Add("Name")

'Add 3 customers to the table
table.Rows.Add("La Hacienda Ranch")
table.Rows.Add("Chili's Grill & Bar")
table.Rows.Add("Dickey's BBQ Pit")

'What about Sorting?
Dim view As DataView = table.DefaultView
view.Sort = "Name ASC"

'What about filtering?
view.RowFilter = "Name='La Hacienda Ranch'"


Another example is, How do you handle the IDataErrorInfo interface? You have to do a bit of work with OOP, but with ADO.NET... You don't have to do anything, because it's already implemented in a DataTable... Sweet!

What about all of the other concerns about data validation? Create a Strongly-Typed DataSet, add a Customers DataTable to it, Double-Click on it to create the ColumnChanging event, and then validate away!


Overall, it's a pretty good book. And it's definitely worth reading, even if you don't end up using the OOP concepts presented, because there are quite a few things you can learn that will help you as a developer.

In the end, the path to OOP architechture or ADO.NET architecture is up to, but hopefully I've provided you with a few helpful thoughts.


Gary Lima
aka VBRocks
2008 Microsoft Visual Basic MVP
VisualBasicRocks.com

I have totally enjoyed this book. So much so that in my leisure I have opted to work through it a second time. Being a .Net programmer and just beginning to leverage the power object programming: I found the book exhilrating.
I never knew how she was going to pull together: like replacing hard-coded item for database tables.
My only disappointment was that the book ended a little too soon. I would have like to have to have seen somewhat more of a data-entry application.

Stephan Onisick; VB/SQL Consultant

The interest in grid computing has increased dramatically in scientific circles in the last decade, due in part to the need for high performance scientific computing and the availability of operating systems that make the deployment of distributed computing more painless for the scientific investigator. With the exception of financial firms, grid computing has not made inroads into the business community. Private industry has expressed concerns about the security of grid computing and various psychological barriers have prohibited it from being incorporated even in business LAN environments. This book gives a fairly comprehensive overview of grid computing for those interested in obtaining knowledge as to its efficacy in high performance computing or for those who are investigating whether it can indeed be practical for business. It is readily apparent that the author wants private industry to take grid computing more seriously, and he gives ample discussion of just how this could be done.

Part of this discussion involves the relation between Web services and grid computing. Those readers who deal with Web services would expect a connection between grid computing and Web services, and the `Open Grid Services Architecture', spearheaded by IBM and the Globus team, is an attempt to unify the two. The author points out the main difference between the two architectures, namely that Web services support "persistent" services while grid architectures must also support "transient" services, such as video conferencing. Web services is in place in many different industries at the present time, but it remains to be seen whether it will remain so in years to come, due in part to the conflicts between the different standardization efforts.

The different types of grids that can be configured are also discussed in the book. These include departmental grids, designed for a group of people within an enterprise, enterprise grids which cover all users within an enterprise, and extraprise grids, which can be established within companies. Grid computing has had some reported successes, particular the SETI grid project and the FOLD grid project for calculating protein folding. Both are popular with the public and have GUI interfaces that are very pleasing from an aesthetic point of view.

One of the biggest reasons for not being able to do grid computing in a business environment is the reluctance of management to allow many or all of the machines in the organization to be dedicated to the grid, even if done when the machines are offline. This is true even for the `desktop' grids that are discussed in this book. Subjective factors, such as privacy issues (even if they are not valid) and imagined interference come into play when approaching grid computing in a professional business environment. The presence of distributed software on the various machines in the organization may cause many to believe it is the cause of an outage or other problems when they occur. Trust in grid computing has to develop before it will be used routinely in a business environment. The author does address these concerns in the book.

He also discusses the need for an easier transition to grid computing in a business context, if the decision to deploy it has been made. The time taken to make grid computing a reality in this context must be minimal, considering the great amount of investment that has already been made in designing, implementing, and maintaining existing applications. Such a transition can be handled by using the approach of Web services, or what he calls Grid services. He outlines a few different ways in which the existing code can be wrapped. If the source code is not available, one can wrap the executables for example. If it is, it can wrapped and additional code overlaid on it in order to interface properly with any existing applications. A WSDL (Web Service Description Document) is then generated and placed in a registry service, in order that other applications can make use of the service. The Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) registry is the one that is advocated by the author.

Several applications of grid computing are discussed in the book, each having various degrees of ease in actual deployment. Numerical applications using Monte Carlo are viewed as the easiest ones to be "grid-enabled", and this is born out in experience. Financial and biotechnology firms in particular are heavy users of grid-enabled applications that utilize Monte Carlo simulations. The author discusses a rudimentary test, called the `compute intensity ratio' to check whether an application is suitable for deploying on a grid. If this ratio is greater than one, then the application is deemed to be well suited for distributed processing on a grid. Applications in desktop grid computing such as risk management and financial derivatives, molecular docking for drug discovery, and architectural rendering are briefly discussed.

As an example of a cluster grid, the famous Beowulf cluster, which is heavily used in scientific computing, is discussed in the book. Scientific computing is the major driver behind grid computing, as is readily apparent throughout the book. Discussion of high performance grid computing occupies an entire chapter of the book in fact. Production High Performance Computing via the use of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) has allowed scientists to develop grid applications more effectively, without having to worry too much about architectural issues.

The author has included several examples of how grid computing is used in the business community, such as in telecommunications and bioinformatics. There are more examples than he discusses, but they are usually not made public because of considerations of propriety. Businesses that have used grid computing to further their success are usually not vocal in their approaches. The book would have been better if the author had included actual benchmarking studies of how businesses have improved their financial positions by using grid computing, with in-depth figures that illustrate quantitatively the power of grid computing. The inclusion of such studies would definitely assist those who are seriously considering grid computing.

The newest, highest performance PC's are more powerful than the biggest supercomputers of the early 1990's. But with the higher computational capacity the bigger the tasks assigned to be computed. Note that these are not your typical business applications. The biggest computational tasks today lie in four areas: atomic energy research, weather prediction, cryptography and bioinformatics.

Some of these tasks lend themselves well to being split up amongst a bunch of computers. Cryptography, as an example lends itself well to taking a message and assigning each computer to attack the message with a different key. The processing is independent of the results from other computers attacking the message. What one computer could do eventually, 30,000 or 3 million can do just that much faster.

This book is obviously on using a collection of computers, not necessarily co-located to handle such complex computing tasks. A full time practitioner writes it with collaboration from leaders in the field.

This book's goal is to serve as a complete guide to the SSL VPN technology and its implementation on Cisco SSL VPN-capable devices. It starts with the introduction to remote access VPN and SSL VPN technology before exploring the design consideration and Cisco SSL VPN family of products. The last part explains the SSL VPN implementation and configuration for Cisco ASA and Cisco IOS routers before it ends with the discussion on SSL VPN management.

This book is not for network beginners. Prior knowledge of VPN technology and familiarity with Cisco command line interface is needed as the book explains the remote access VPN technology concepts only briefly.

The book does come with a lot of screen shots and illustrations particularly on SSL VPN configuration chapters. It is trying to show readers how to configure SSL VPN thru ASDM but it also needs to provide CLI configuration so readers have alternative if they do not want to wade thru pages of pages of screenshots to configure SSL VPN.

The book also needs to provide more reference as the provided configurations will only help readers to get the SSL VPN up and running but are missing many optional SSL VPN configurations.

Although the book claims to be a complete guide, it does not even dedicate a chapter for SSL VPN troubleshooting guide. The troubleshooting section provided at the end of configuration chapters is quite meaningless.

The last chapter on SSL VPN management looks more like a brochure for Cisco Security Manager (CSM) and Cisco Access Control Server (ACS) product. It only covers a very general concept of SSL VPN policy configuration and provisioning using CSM and ACS with a reference at the back of the chapter to go to Cisco web site to look up on how to configure CSM and ACS.

All of this makes me confused on what target audience the book tries to cover as it is too complex for network beginners but not detail enough for people who already have extensive VPN knowledge. I find it interesting that the cover of the book indicates that it will serve as an introduction for SSL VPN but inside it claims to be a complete guide for SSL VPN technology.

In spite of these, I rate this book 4 out of 5 and still recommend the book. It has a lot of helpful information that can help readers to get familiar with SSL VPN concept and configuration quickly. Beginners who have no VPN knowledge should read Richard Deal's The Complete Cisco VPN Configuration Guide book first before moving on to read this. VPN network experts can read this to get the basic working knowledge of SSL VPN.

When my new computer came with Windows Vista, I purchased several books on the Vista operating system. I relied heavily on "The Complete Reference Windows XP" for information about Windows XP. This book, although still useful, is not as good as its predecessor. It also does not include a CD of the text, as did the XP version.

I've worked with WINDOWS for my entire 7 years working with PCs and I've always found these folks to be able to meet my reference needs consistently and concisely. The set-up of their books is logical and easy to use. I'm by no means a computer whiz or geek, and my troubled and faulty mind occasionally needs help in dealing with WINDOWS, especially after getting comfy with XP and previous versions. For some reason, despite the obvious user-friendly changes in VISTA, my poor feeble brain resists grasping a fair amount of changes easily (just chalk it up to my age & unwillingness to change) Anyway, this book & it's previous incarnations are the mainstay of my PC references and I recommend them without hesitation.

The knowledge in this book is "almost there."

I purchased "Windows Vista: The Complete Reference" to familiarize myself with Vista since I do not have a Vista machine but needed the knowledge for work. I had used the XP Reference book and found it very informative.

Prior to purchasing this book I purchased another Vista book published by Que: "Using Microsoft Windows Vista." Having started the Que book first I naturally compared the two. The XP Reference book leaves out some very important information on file encryption.

If you are a casual user of Vista, this book is written in a simple, user friendly manner and should suffice. A more advanced user should purchase the Que book.

The Palm Zire is the workhorse of PDAs, It comes with two MB of memory amd can display up to fifteen shades of gray; and it is gloriously inexpensive. For many of us the Zire is all that is needed, and then some. (I have a few thousand entries on mine, plus some third-party applications, plus a book of poetry - Billy Collins, "Nine Horses"), and so far have used only about half the available memory.

The Zire is also delightfully simple to use. In order to realize its full capabilities, however, some help is needed; and that is where this book comes in. Written with admirable clarity and refreshing humor, "How to do Everything with your Zire Handheld" is the complete guide to the Zire. It explains the basics and much, much more. I regard it as essential reading for anyone with a Zire. It has helped me immensely. I have no doubt that it will help others.

In short, if you have a Zire, trust me: you need this book. Both informative and entertaining, "How to do Everything with your Zire Handheld"is a superb exploration of the humble Zire's extraordinary abilities. Until I read it, I had no idea that the Zire could do so much so well. It made me realize that the Zire is even more of a bargain that I had thought.

This is an item that I was waiting for. A textbook that will teach me to become familiar with Microsoft Publisher. You have my highest rating. Thank you.

Donald Woodson

All the files required to do the exercises in this book come with a teachers edition. If you buy this book, you would have to already know Publisher in order to create the files required to complete all the exercises. If you can do that, you don't need this book.

This is a learner's book, but it's very outdated (note the $0.01 price in Amazon marketplace). If you want to learn to write applets, look for a newer book.

It says "Hooked on Java", you will be. It's subtitled "Creating Hot Web Sites With Java Applets", with this book in hand, you can. This is one of those books that you keep on the desk while you are building your pages. Even though it is written by Java experts, the basics are never overlooked. A fair amount of sample code and example HTML pages are incorporated in the book, with lots more available on the included CD.

This book fits its short description on the cover perfectly. "Creating Hot Web Sites with Java Applets." It describes the process, and the ideas behind Java, and also the integration of Java into web pages. In short, the book fit its purpose perfectly. I was disapointed in the description of Java programming at the end of the book, and when I had mastered the integration of Java into my web pages, I was still longing for more.

This was the first book on Java that I bought and it provided a reasonable introduction to the language. There were lots of details about Java that it did not cover and I did not find it well organised for reference, so it was not long before I found myself buying other books on Java to make up for these problems. Still, as an introduction it is quite approachable and it certainly communicates the authors' enthusiasm for the topic

The central theme of Exodus is the concept of "attention migration". That is: that more and more people choose to immerse themselves in synthetic worlds (Castronova's word instead of "virtual worlds") - MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games), like Second Life and World of Warcraft. Today they have at least 16 million registered users, and the number is increasing quickly. Also, some of these synthetic worlds function like alternate societies with their own norms of conduct, citizenships, economies, codes and policies and so on. In a information society where attention is central, the increasing attention spent on synthetic worlds will (according to Castronova) create a "atmospeheric event"...
Castronova writes well and he discusses this social phenomenon and it's probable future impact in an interesting way. Though at times I think the discussion becomes a little repetitive, and I can't totally agree that "real" societies will have to become more "fun" and gamelike to compete with the synthetic counterparts. But it is a fascinating thought.

I read and thoroughly enjoyed Castronova's first book on the subject: Synthetic Worlds. And, as in SW, Castronova is at is strongest in Exodus when he explains the "realness" of virtual worlds. The main thesis of Exodus is that because synthetic worlds are more fun, people will increasingly choose to spend time in them over the real world, and that, eventually, the real world must remodel itself, taking cues from virtual worlds; eventually the real world must become more fun. Exodus, though it has a few interesting new contributions, is terribly repetitive book that takes way too long getting to the substantial points. When it finally does, it is shallow in its descriptions and analyses of how, exactly, the exodus to synthetic worlds is going to radically affect the real world.

The biggest flaw (among the several I found in the book) is Castronova's thesis itself - that the real world will eventually have to model itself on synthetic worlds. The flaw is evident in his use of "migration" as the metaphor for what's going on with synthetic worlds. He explains that a family migrates from Old Country to New Country, and then tells its friends back in Old how great New is. Eventually, after hearing how great New is over and again, those that stayed put in Old put pressure on their government to change the country, to make it more like New. Castronova provides no historical examples of this, and I don't know my history well enough to know if this is how it has happened in the past, but the flaw in the metaphor is, and Castronova admits this himself, that the synthetic migration isn't physical, and therefore not permanent. It's super-easy to switch from real to synthetic, or among various synthetic worlds. This undermines not just his metaphor, but his entire argument...

A better metaphor, one that incorporates the ease of movement between places/activities, would be engagement in different activities, like sports: I play baseball when I want to hit home runs; I play football when I want to score touchdowns; I don't complain that I can't hit a home run in football. Or even more broadly: I go to the gym to work out; I go to the library to study. I don't complain that I can't run on a treadmill in the library. Why wouldn't this be the result of synthetic worlds? I hop into WoW to partake of the "good vs. evil" shared lore. I hop into SL to sell virtual real estate. I hop into the real world to go for a run, eat lunch, take a nap, kiss my spouse. Why should I expect to be able to do any of these things in the other worlds? Once it's established that the synthetic worlds provide fun, and that the real world does not, why/how does it follow that the real world must aspire to be more fun, like synthetic worlds? Why would I demand that the real world also be fun?

Castronova's argument that people will go where their utility is highest points to the same problem in his argument. He thinks synthetic worlds provide the highest utility, so off people go. But it's not as simple as "the world with the highest aggregate utility wins." There are different goods to be achieved in different worlds, so people will always come back to the real world for the goods that only it can provide (Castronova raises the issue of childbirth/rearing in a different context, but I think it's an adequate example of what I'm talking about here). Now, maybe some day in the future it really will be possible to hook up electrodes and "virtually" experience things we once thought we could only experience in the real world: eating a cheeseburger, having sex with our partner, giving birth to a child. But I think we are far from that point and can still easily say that there are just some things that we can only do in the real world. It seems more likely to me that we'll end up in a future where we go to synthetic worlds for fun, but still come back to the real world for other activities, even if they aren't fun.

This is a very interesting book that deserves more attention than I fear it's likely to get. The author has used his experiences with synthetic game-worlds to write a thought-provoking look at the social landscape of the future, and craft a compelling argument for the way games will influence "reality" in the years to come.

The author has more game-experience than I was expecting when I picked up this book, and has avoided the easy traps and overgeneralizations that often plague writers who are attempting to explain or interpret synthetic game-worlds. This lends his thesis on the economics of fun a verisimilitude that makes even his more extreme predictions seem a likely vision of what-might-be. Not only is this a book for the interested game, but even more it's a book for the businessman, and the policy-maker, who will more and more benefit from his insight into the games people play.

This book was not what I expected. It is primarily a reflection on lessons learned through development of digital games that could be applied to real life. The author doesn't seem to have any expectation that they will be applied exactly as described and doesn't address the myriad details that would need to be dealt with for that to happen, but the whole concept provides a lot of interesting food for thought.

For example, two general themes that cut through a lot of the lessons are the importance of fun and the idea that people's experiences playing digital games are likely to influence their expectations for how things should work back in the "real world" outside of games. So if the book had been called something like "Real Life Lessons from Digital Games," it would have delivered well on the expectations set by the title.

As it was, I found the title misleading for a couple of reasons. First, while the title refers to "Virtual Worlds" most of the lessons relate specifically to game-based virtual environments. Social worlds such as Second Life are discussed, but the author specifically acknowledges the fact that these are quite different from game-based environments which have clearly defined goals, roles, rules, rewards, etc. Therefore, if your interest relates more to open-ended worlds, such as Second Life, that are used for a variety of purposes and are not focussed on a single unified game, then there may be less in this book for you than you would guess from the title.

Second, the Exodus part of the title made me think that the book would talk more about what will happen within virtual worlds when more of us spend more time in them (e.g., How will it change the ways we work, play, communicate, consume, etc? What are the legal and political implications since so many more of our interactions will involve people from other countries?), but as stated previously the book is more about how interacting within virtual environments will change our expectations for interactions outside of those environments. Related to this is the idea - which seems to stem in part from the games versus more multi-faceted worlds distinction made previously - that we will at any one time be in either the virtual world or the real world and not both simultaneously (at least in terms of our attention). My own belief is that over time virtual worlds will become integrated with the other parts of our lives just as the Web is now, but that type of integration is only discussed briefly in the book.