Automatic-Data-Processing

Voice over IP Technologies is an outstanding piece of work, reflecting much of Mark Miller's exceptional knowledge of voice and data communications systems and multi-protocol networks. He is, in fact and without question, one of the leading experts in the field of network design, analysis and troubleshooting across the LAN, MAN and WAN domains. And he is a leading authority on ATM, Frame Relay and the TCP/IP protocol suite ... and their meaningful applications.

The value of all that expertise is much greater value, of course, if it can be shared effectively with others. Mark Miller's considerable skills as an author have been honed in a dozen or so previous books, and are well demonstrated in this excellent work. The information is well organized and clearly stated, and is supported with numerous graphics. There are numerous appendixes, including a most helpful glossary. The work also is very well indexed, which I consider to be extremely important for future reference.

As a technologist, I can appreciate the accuracy of the information contained in this book. As a consultant, I can appreciate its integrity. As an author, I can appreciate the care with which the subject matter has been researched, the way it has been organized, and the thoroughly understandable manner in which it is presented. When I need to research a technical topic for a book, article or column I am writing, or for a consulting project, I generally skip past the several hundred other references on my shelf and reach for one of Mark Miller's books. When the topic is VoIP, I reach for this one first. I recommend that you do the same.

There are many good books on speech processing, but not too many also cover music processing. In that sense, this book is good. However, the major shortcoming of this book is that in its attempt to cover many topics, it doesn't really cover any topics in great detail. The material in this book is merely a good introduction, but one is forced to go to the cited references to find more detail on specific subjects. My overall feeling on this book is rather neutral. If you are just interested in speech processing, there are other books out there which have better coverage. But I am still look for a good book that covers the signal processing of music.

The basic purpose of this book is to understand sound well enough to be able to perform speech recognition, but it also contains a lot of material relevant to music recognition and synthesis. By some quirk of international pricing, the price of this book in the UK is about half what it is in the USA, so it may be worth your while checking out UK online bookstores such as amazon.co.uk or the UK branch of bol.com for this one.

OK, maybe the title of my review's a little misleading, in the sense that this book doesn't match the inimitable Douglas Adam's masterpiece in humour.I meant it in a more literal sense, that is,this book is an excellent guide to the field of Speech & Audio Processing, with a 'holistic' approach to the subject that is refreshing indeed.It can be approached by newcomers with little difficulty - it isn't 'overly mathematical', though all the essential maths is definitely there.The experts, too, shall find new insights from two leading experts in the field.

What i like best about the book is that the chapters are short - average chapter size is only about 15 pages.Thus material is presented in 'bite-sized' chunks, making it much easier to digest.Also, since the authors opt to focus on breadth more than on depth, the book isn't imposingly thick.The layout is also very nice,making it even more of a pleasure to read.

The clarity of writing is another strong point of the book, as are the illustrations.The authors go to the heart of the matter, successfully imparting the flavour of the topic, be it the basics, or the current state-of-the-art.An excellent chapterwise bibliography makes it easy to trace further details on any topic.

All in all, it's a great book, one which stands out for the originality of its approach and the expertise of its authors. In my opinion, anyone working in the area of Speech/Audio processing should have a copy of this most accessible guide.

I appreciated the balance between theory and implementation in the book. Also the content covers the most important topics. It is unfortunate that the book contains numerous typo's and confusing choices of symbols. The errors are often right in the most critical places too. The explanation of the theory of HMM's for example. 0 and 1 are chosen to represent both white and black balls and 2 different urns all in the same diagram. When trying to sort out which is which the reader will be further confused by blatant errors where a 0 should be a 1. I am afraid many new readers will find frustration on the theory sections.

The choice of C++ and inclusion of a CD-ROM with full source is a nice touch however. Just be aware that the code is not geared for real-time recognition.

This book is composed of two parts, theory and implementation. if you only read its theoretical part, it is ok with many details missing. it is not clearly written. however, if you study its C++ code, you would get all you want on recognition system. I spent 3-8 hours everyday for 4 months going through its code line by line. The C++ code (30,000 lines in total) is very well written but without comments. Many times, I need to figure out things not written in the book. I once spent 1 week on 200 lines of code. However, After 4 months, I truely understand the system.

You will find this book useful only if you really spend time covering its C++ code line by line. If you want theory only, goto read other books.

I rate 2 star for its theory and 5 star for its implementation.

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I want to know about HMM. And c-source code

This a book about enterprise integration solutions, authors claim that they are technology neutral, it is true. In the examples and implementations, they chose 3 most popular messaging frameworks to illustrate the patterns. However, they are pretty biased toward messaging as the "better" solution to enterprise integration strategy. It may have a lot of edges over the other approaches, sometimes it is just easy to use a simple wrapper/facade to do the integration. But I guess authors really intend to push their messaging solutions as the subtitle indicates.

Having said that, this is an excellent book of message pattern language, which I believe is the first one introducing the interesting topic. The books touches from the architectural patterns, e.g., messaging bus, pipe and filters, to common design patterns, e.g., publish/subscribe, request/reply, to some patterns that most MOMs provide as integrated solutions, e.g., durable subscriber, message filter, message expiration etc. With all these patterns at hand, a system architect would be able to craft a messaging pattern-oriented enterprise integration architecture by applying the appropriate patterns compositely.

The book would be better if authors describe some patterns implementation in more detail. E.g., it would be interesting to see how the message expiration is implemented, does the message contain a timer or the message channel monitor each individual message from start up? How does the channel interact with the message and check the expiry? Guaranteed delivery is another example. I know most of these implementation details only interest MOM developers, whereas pattern users are only interested in how and when to apply the patterns, but now that the book is about patterns themselves, implementation details would be appreciated.

Since all the patterns introduced in the book form a messaging pattern language, knowing each pattern's strength and limitation under the context, scope and different forces, and how it interacts with other patterns to form a bigger(composite) pattern are essential to grasp the pattern language. A collaboration diagram to show each pattern's transition/migration/composition to each other would be helpful.

This is a nice book because it identifies and names the patterns for enterprise integration.

But in certain places the author adds to the confusion out there in the software industry. In Chapter 2, Page 51, Martin Fowler says Web Services are the new way for Remote Procedure Invocation. This is not the case anymore. Today you are discouraged from looking at Web Services only as a firewall-friendly and platform-independent version of traditional RPC protocols.

Web Services are one of the major (but not the only) element of the Service-Oriented Architecture and when it comes to Web Services, you should be really looking at passing messages, and not invoking remote components.

Gregor has a gift for explaining design patterns. We were trying to explain the problems with passing a large file up and down a messaging bus to our bioinformatics users, when I ran across Enterprise Integration Patterns. As soon as I showed the Claim Check pattern to our designers, they got it instantly. Five of my colleagues purchased the book, and we asked Gregor to come teach a class on it. This is the best written book on design patterns I've seen. I reallly like the list of patterns inside the book cover -- nice terse explanation, and great mnemonic icons.

I'd have rated this book much lower if it wasn't cram packed full of great information. The problem is, the writing style makes it impossible to read this book from cover to cover if you don't already know everything in it. If ever an IT book was screaming for a glossary, this was the one. The author habitually uses terms and acronyms as if the reader already knew them, and then goes on to define them chapters later. At least on one occassion, I found a term used in chapter 2 defined in chapter 3. The definition of the term used another that wasn't defined until chapter 5. As said, there's no glossary, and the index is entirely too sparse to cover for that omission. Reading this book WILL teach you well, but don't sit down with it without a reference library and/or net connection handy to look up the terms that you can't find any other way.

Caputo provides an excellent balance between theoretical background and Cisco specific information. Chapter 3, "voice concepts for data engineers" provides just the right level of information needed to understand voice technology, and the challenges of packetized delivery.

Another nice featue is the clearly tabulated facts and figures, which make this book an excellent reference for even the experienced reader.

Overall, Caputo has provided a text that contains everything required to understand and implement successful voice and data integrated networks with Cisco technology.

The information is geared towards the network engineer that has limited phone knowledge, which was perfect for my own background.

The book has excellent technical accuracy and the data is presented well. The book requires relatively strong strength in a networking background because many references are made to associated technologies without explaining them. Explaining such things would be outside the scope of this book.

When/if you read this book, try to seek out unfamiliar terms in the index or look them up elsewhere. Most of the data is relevant and worth understanding as you go along.

Reading and understanding this book gave me a great understanding of VoIP and I now believe that I can effectively evaluate and implement VoIP solutions.

The CCIE program has publicly announced inclusion of VoIP in the CCIE Routing-Switching laboratory exam. Through my experience, I belive that this book is a valuable resource in acquiring the VoIP knowledge necessary to achieve this certification.

This book is different from other books in image processing, since it also handles speech processing and gives much information on programming in C++. The authors provide free source codes with this book on a ftp-site.

The first introduction is about software development and ways to work with more people on one source code. It gives much information on programming. Then information is given on the difference between C and C++. I liked this overview very much, since I am used to program in C and not in C++.

An overview is given of the different kind of image processing operations in a compact way. Some information is given on statistical and neural pattern recogniton.

This book is a good learning book, whereas it can also be used as a reference source. The contents of the book is organized in a proper way, so it is not difficult to find the right information.

The book covers most topics which is very seldom found any where else

This books provides some great ideas of where and how to get started with Speech Interfaces. I found the interviews to be very helpful. The people interviewed within the book share great insights and ideas as to where they see speech technology going in the future. The technology discussed in the book is low cost, and in my opinion, not very high tech. There are better solutions which can handle more robust speech applications, none of which were mentioned here.

Written in 1990, the book shows the vast constrast between what was practical in the field of speech recognition then, and what is achievable now.

In 1990, most speech recognition was of single words, not continuous speech, and it was of a given speaker. That is, it was not speaker independent. Plus, due to the limited memory and slow cpus, often the analysis was not in anything approaching realtime. Typically, the speaker would say something, word by word, and this would be recorded in digital form, which would then be analysed.

Even with these hardware limitations, the papers describe promising approaches and indeed of good progress in the subject. Which is actually what did happen subsequently.

As an aside, Kai-Fu Lee came to prominence at Carnegie Mellon in the late 80s, writing key parts of the Sphinx speech recognition system, which was highly regarded as the benchmark of its time.

Good Reference on the main methods. Covers Householder, Givens, and Normal equation methods in some detail.

It also has some somewhat dated Fortran Code

Klevans and Rodman did an excellent job at presenting the theory and application of voice recognition. The book goes into just the right amount of detail that a subject of this nature requires. Also, various models and techniques for dealing with speech recognition were explored, with the pros and cons of each carefully stated. It was certainly a pleasure to have read this book, and the new ideas/techniques that were presented, have influenced me to further my research in speech recognition.