Lighting by Design

Free eBooks >> Lighting by Design - Lighting by Design is a practical guide structured around a new theoretical approach to the design of lighting for architectural spaces. Christopher Cuttle outlines his unique three-level approach to lighting design in this indispensable text for students and professionals. Through Observation, Visualisation and Realization, the book explains how to envision, develop and produce your own lighting ideas. Architects, interior designers and specialist lighting designers will benefit from a holistic approach to the lighting process, combining technical information with a distinctive design theory.

Cuttle begins with the development of observational skills, leading to the ability to visualise architectural spaces in light. The final stage of realising the lighting concept involves application of calculational procedures to develop a technical lighting specification. The text includes practical advice on meeting design specifications and contractual obligations. There is also a glossary of technical terms and symbols, and a guide to the calculations that the author uses for quantifying lighting concepts.

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The Fundamentals of Creative Design

Free eBooks >> The Fundamentals of Creative Design - A comprehensive introduction to typography, layout, image and color usage, and othe creative design principles presented through detailed explanation illustrated with examplars from contemporary design.
More than 200 color photos, plus 50 black and white illustrations, provide an illuminating, highly visual introduction to the key elements of graphic design. Each subject matter, or “fundamental"? uses detailed diagrammatic explanations to help students understand the basics. Formats and printing, layout, image and color usage, and more all receive the same in-depth treatment, always with an emphasis on real life application and possibilities.

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Database system concepts

Free eBooks >> Database system concepts - This is a required book for my undergrad Databases class. While reading over it before the semester started I began to wonder why my professor would ever choose such a terrible book. Of course it became clear when, on the first day of class, the professor began to read word for word off slides with the names of the authors sitting at the bottom along with the familiar 'cute' artwork from the cover. Note to instructors: choosing a book because it provides prewritten notes and allows you to be extra lazy is not a valid reason for choosing a textbook. The book is filled with lots of mathematical notation with few good examples. By good examples I mean those that involve realistic databases and not the 'Consider a schema R = (A, B, C, D, E)...' mathematical drivel that fills most of the pages.

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Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition

Free eBooks >> Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition - INTRODUCTION TO ALGORITHMS is pretty much the standard textbook in the field of algorithms. In its favor is the fact that it is quite comprehensive, covering a wide range of topics that the beginning student will need to know. On the other hand, it has a tendency towards the confusing and the obscure, with many of the example problems not making a lot of sense. If one decides to purchase this book (and the students will have no choice in this matter, being subject as they are to the whims of their professors), then I recommend that one immediately prints out the "bug correction" page available on the web, as there are several major howlers present in the book, and if one isn't careful then many hours will be lost while one checks and rechecks faulty pseudo-code. In one particularly confused portion of the book, the correction sheet completely replaces three entire pages of the text.

This book covers a huge amount of material, and many of the topics are described quite adequately. Although readers may already be familiar with the numerous data structures that are discussed, the book doesn't assume prior knowledge and goes into quite a lot of detail concerning them. These sections, in particular, are illustrated clearly and offer great reference material that every programmer should have access to. This portion on data structures is one area where the book's conciseness is an advantage. It's simple enough for the beginner to learn from, but it contains more than enough information for the advanced user in need of mental refreshing.

The opening sections that discuss the rudiments of algorithm analysis are also covered competently. The easier subjects don't suffer from the book's shortcomings, as these ideas aren't quite as difficult to understand. For a simple introduction to the easier-to-grasp concepts in Algorithms, these sections simply can't be bettered. It's not until later chapters that some of the material appears incomprehensible.

Other parts of the book are very confusing to the beginning students who, presumably, make up the bulk of the target audience. If this text is used as an accompaniment to a class (as it usually is), then you'll probably do all right. One really needs to have some other source of information, because this book tends to get quite confusing. The problem sets included are frequently obscure, and don't always relate to the material in that chapter. The fact that many of the problems have no given solution (even if one attempts to contact the authors!) is quite telling. The style of the book is extremely dry and occasionally impenetrable, even when compared to other computer science textbooks.

If you're looking at this page, then no doubt you're looking mainly for pricing information, since this book is the definitive standard on the subject. Keep in mind that "definitive" doesn't necessarily mean perfect, and, alas, this book is far from perfection. But if you have an alternative method of learning the material, then this is an excellent book to have as accompaniment. And once you've learned the material, you'll find this to be a great resource.

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Richard Carter, "Magento 1.3 Theme Design"

Free eBooks >> Richard Carter, "Magento 1.3 Theme Design" - Magento is the hottest and most powerful e-commerce software around and it has gained massive popularity in a short period. By using Magento's powerful theming engine, you can control the look, content, and functionality, and easily launch a flexible e-commerce web site. However, because of its powerful features, developing Magento themes is easier said than done.

Magento 1.3 Theme Design covers everything you need to build effective, attractive themes for your Magento store. You will learn how the theming system works, how to build your own look on top of the Magento Blank Theme, how to give different looks to different parts of your store, and much more.

We start off by introducing you to Magento and its basic themes and then take you through the benefits of changing your store's theme. We then move on to the actual Magento theme design, where you will learn the basics, such as changing the logo, color scheme, and so on. Next, we take a look at more advance tasks where you will learn theme layouts. You will then prepare a Magento theme from scratch and also take a look at Magento templates and layouts. You will also learn how to promote and improve your Magento store with the use of social media such as Twitter, social bookmarks, and so on and how to define a good print style. Finally, you will learn Magento Theme Deployment in detail.

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Programming the Mobile Web

Free eBooks >> Programming the Mobile Web - The purpose of this book is to identify best practices when creating web applications that will be consumed by mobile web browsers. It not only does an excellent job outlining those best practices, but it's incredibly up to date in its content. Not only is there information related to "retina display" available in iPhone 4, but there is also a brief discussion about how Palm has been purchased by HP (both events occurred only a few months ago). 

The book begins by providing the most comprehensive discussion of mobile browsers that I've ever seen. The author furthers this discussion throughout the book by providing some of the most detailed information on the compatibility between these various mobile browsers and the standards that each one supports. The book warrants a purchase simply for this information alone. 

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Software Fault Tolerance Techniques and Implementation (Artech House Computer Security Series)

Free eBooks >> Software Fault Tolerance Techniques and Implementation (Artech House Computer Security Series) - This books provides really detailed description of many software FT techniques down to a minisqule details. Despite all the details it is lacking good implementation examples and often gets so repetitive so I felt like author copy-pasted entire sections from one chapter to another. For example chapter 5.2.3.2 Starts as "There have been numerous investigations into the performance of software fault tolerance ... and so on" then chapter 5.3.4.2 "Thre have been numerous investigations into the performance of software fault tolerance ...". If you read this book end to end somewhere from first half you'll start getting this anoying feeling of "Déjà vu". Reference sections are very good for most chapters.

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PC MagazineOffice 2007 Solutions

Free eBooks >> PC MagazineOffice 2007 Solutions  - This well-organized guide is perfect for existing Office users who are familiar with the basics and now want to maximize and customize their use of the newest release. In addition to teaching readers the newest features, the book goes beyond discussing just the basic features of Office 2007 and offers some invaluable insight on increasing productivity and saving time. Readers will quickly and easily implement various solutions for Word 2007, Excel 2007, Access 2007, PowerPoint 2007, and Outlook 2007. Read by more than six million people worldwide, PC Magazine has proven itself to be the world's most trusted consumer technology magazine and it continues to cover timely and cutting-edge subject matter with authoritative advice and instruction

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Web Data Management

Free eBooks >> Web Data Management - Existence of huge amounts of data on the Web has developed an undeferring need to locate right information at right time, as well as to integrating information effectively to provide a comprehensive source of relevant information. There is a need to develop efficient tools for analyzing and managing Web data, and efficiently managing Web information from the database perspective. The book proposes a data model called WHOM (Warehouse Object Model) to represent HTML and XML documents in the warehouse. It defines a set of web algebraic operators for building new web tables by extracting relevant data from the Web, as well as generating new tables from existing ones. These algebraic operators are used for change detection.

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Developing Software with UML: Object-Oriented Analysis and Design in Practice (2nd Edition)

Free eBooks >> Developing Software with UML - The book explains in a nice form the "Object-Orientation for Beginners", but I don't know if OO beginners understand everything directly. The chapter about the Project Management needs to be reworked because there is a possibility to fall into a slumber... The rest part II (Example: Analysis; Design) and part III (Fundamentals of the UML), for which I decided to buy the book, is excellent. A book, nice to have! Thanks for the book! [Romain Cloos; MSc Computer Science; Société Européenne des Satellites...

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Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails

Free eBooks >> Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails - Practical Reporting with Ruby and Rails is primarily a book about the presentation of reports. Having gone in expecting a mixture of presentation and production techniques I was a little surprised to find that the vast majority of the reader's time is spent looking at various GUI and graphing toolkits, export to MS Office and the like, and there's not much space given to managing large volumes of data, warehousing, and other such topics. 

That's not a criticism of the book so much as a caution to potential readers. After a little time spent looking at ActiveRecord, particularly focussing on using its calculation methods to save processor time, David Berube provides a pretty thorough coverage of a variety of ways to present reports. A few options for delivering data as PDFs, through a GUI, or directly into office are offered and a straightforward walkthrough is provided for each. The Rails content is minimal, and while the sample code could do with some refactoring and there'd be a case for using something more lightweight like merb it does the job. 

But I must confess to being a little disappointed that there wasn't more time spent on the data processing side of the equation. Having been building a lot of graphs lately and needing to write some new reporting code in the near future it was helpful to have some analysis of tools I might use, but I never felt like the book ever really dove into the complexities of reporting. There's space in a book of this sort for serious consideration of both data processing and of visualisation techniques, but neither is really offered. Each chapter simply answers a very tightly defined request rather than delving into the full problem domain, and that feels like a missed opportunity. 

If you're evaluating output options for your ruby application's reporting layer, this may be a handy book to have. It'll provide you with a sense of what tools are appropriate for which problems and more detailed sample code than is easily found on the web. But if you're looking to really grapple with reporting and visualisation you might be better off seeking out a good SQL reference and some of Tufte's books. 

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Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server(TM) 2/E 2008

Free eBooks >> Delivering Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server - This author sets out to walk you through a huge subject, which is Microsoft's BI stack, in a single volume and does an admiral job of introducing the key concepts and components that a Microsoft implementation requires. It should be considered a starting point from which much is to be gained. Experienced BI developers will learn about the new features in SQL 2008. He also spends an entire chapter on Transformers or Microsoft SSIS explaining each of the components and going into detail where required. His explanation of the Unified Data Model is quite good. 

The only thing I didn't like about this book was that you need the custom database that is free and is downloadable and that he refers to throughout the book. What's not to like about that? You cannot find any link on the publisher's site, the reference to the page in the book doesn't work and searching for the code on the publisher's site returns empty. I finally contacted customer service who sent me over to technical services that finally sent me the link. Not the author's problem but maybe technical books should come out of the technical press. 

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