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This is an excellent book on powerbuilder programming targeted mainly at intermediate and advanced level programmers and provides step by step code not found in other powerbuilder books. This book does not waste too much of time on theories ,but wherever possible provides useful hints.Till date, there is no powerbuilder book in the market that provides plenty of code,and this book does fill that void.Only minus point is lack of PFC coverage.I really wonder why waite group is yet to release their next version(ie PB 6 how to) and I am eagerly awaiting its release.

This is a fantastic book which Provides a lot of code not found in other PB books that too in an excellent step by step HOW TO format.It mainly targets the intermediate to the advanced level Programmer although beginners can also benefit from it and advance quickly.Lack of PFC coverage is the only minus aspect about this book.It wastes very little time on theories as is the case with most other PB books.Topics covered include OLE, API calls etc. I am eagerly waiting for their next release.(ie PB6 how to)

This is a book which provides a lot of code in an excellent HOW TO format.It does not waste much time on theories as is the case with most other Powerbuilder books.Instead it teaches through practical examples and Provides step by step code. from beginner to advanced level.Lack of PFC coverage is the only minus aspect.I am eagerly waiting for their next release.(ie PB6.0 how to)

This book is an excellent, rigorous introduction to concurrent programming. This book concentrates on principles and theory, providing an excellent background for concurrent programming.

A calculus for reasoning about concurrent programming is presented, along with problems, solutions, and proofs for common concurrent programming issues.

An superb academic treatment of the topic, but not for the weak kneed.

Used at the University of Liege, Belgium as reference for the Parallel System lecture. Everyone found it very useful

A very good introductory text to concurrent programming, using something like pseudo-ada as the example language. It starts introducing the basics concepts, like deadlocks, starvation, contention, etc. There's a entire chapter for Semaphores and Another one for Monitors. So, it explores the folclorical problem of the Dinning Philosophers. Real paralell programming is discused too. There's special chapters for the Languages Linda, Ocan and Ada. It ends with a review of the Spartian Generals problem and a chapter about real time sistems

Unfortunately by the time I got this book, I had to learn many things from other sources or simply by guessing and trying. Its first two parts confirmed most of my beliefs on the topics or put right the rest. The third part gave me tremendous help to become more effective and confident in the use of the tools. Having read it half way through I am pretty sure that what I am doing is right. Time to time I use it as a manual as well. Worth every cent!

I love this book even though its really thick. It covers TMS in excruciating detail while remaining quite readable for new Basis administrators and consultants. Much clearer than the confusing training materials for the SAP course I took recently. Get it and become a TMS SAP expert!

This well-written book has been immensely helpful in bringing me up to speed on R/3 change management practices. It certainly goes far beyond R/3 on-line help. It is both well-organized and of great depth and breadth. The glossary alone was worth the purchase price.

After taking the SAP class Workload Analysis on performance tuning and being thoroughly baffled and confused, I bought a copy of this book. Much clearer and comprehensive than SAP's technical training I like the sections on memory and sql tuning for R/3. If you're a serious Basis admin or consultant you absolutely must get a copy of this book and learn it!

As a product manager that writes product specifications for SAP performance monitoring utilities I have found this book to be invaluable. As you may suspect I have a veritible library of SAP performance, capacity and administration books but I refer to this one 95% of the time. Undoubtedly the best guide ever written on SAP Performance.

I have said before that performance tuning SAP is more art than science... an arguable point. Thomas Schneider's depth of knowledge and experience regarding this tricky task comes clear in this book. Although lacking in specificity when it comes to database or operating systems, there is a world of usefull information about SAP buffers, processes, traces, and SQL tuning for the BC Admin tasked with improving performance without simply buying more hardware. This book is every bit as good as SAP's monitoring class. I would suggest a solid understanding of performance measurement and tuning for your RDBMS and OS as a pre-requisite to this volume.

This fourth edition, like the previous editions, covers every aspect of satellite communications including the key principles, modulation techniques, earth station, transponders, and, the space segment. Last chapter is a good summary of the reliability concepts. Must be in the bookshelf of any professional telecommunications engineer and graduate/post-graduate students majoring in satellite communications techniques.

If you are really interested to understant the satellite systems, and this is the best of the books for you. The book give you a lot of in deep infomation of the satellite system and have a lot of calculation. The calculation is not easy to understand at all, so this book is not good for the beginner.

Looking for a detailed but straight forward way to learn about satellite communication systems? Maybe your a student looking for study support material on this subject? Well you just found the ultimate book!

Maral et al have put together an excellent step by step approach to understanding this complex subject. The space and ground segments get equal detailed treatment with system design methods and analysis of all the components. This leads to a walk through of link budget calculation including examples with specific technical objectives.

If I could only have one Satellite Comms book then this is it!

I have been developing applicaitons for a number of year now with Access 97 and have many books I have used. This book has become my most recommended. I have found many books on Access to be either too basic or too advanced for me. This book talks about basic concepts and then adds enough advanced information that almost anyone could learn something from it. The concepts are explained in a very understandable way. I wish I had bought this years ago!

Client/Server Programming for Access 97 is a must have for anyone who develops serious applications in Access 97. It contains clear, practical guidelines to create and polish client/server applications using Access 97. I recommend this book to both novices and experts since it impossible to believe that there will not be something of value for anyone who reads it. It can be read cover to cover or used as a reference. As a footnote, I must also add that the paper quality is unusually good and the layouts completely avoid descriptions on one page and diagrams on the other.

I just finished the book and I loved it! It does a very nice job of covering the entire topic in enough depth to provide real answers, while leaving plenty of room for exploration. I'll be downloading some of the examples soon. I particularly liked the "Paired-Pages" arrangement where the right page summarizes and supplements the material presented on the left. It delivers the concepts in convenient bite-size pieces with immediate, built-in reinforcement. It will get my highest recommendation. It now takes it's place on my shelf alongside the other Access "Bible", the Sybex Access97 Developer's Handbook.

For those of you interested in reading a little history, some present implementations and the possibilities the future holds...this book is for you. If you require a more design-oriented book you might look elsewhere. I absolutely loved this book!!

Being the broad-scope work that it is, this book has hit the bulls-eye in terms of coverage. While there have been other books on IAs recently, this one covers all aspects of IAs.

Doing so, it has more positives than negatives; but of course this depends on whether you want an overview of the field, or an Intelligent Agent (IA) in "C" programming reference manual. It is more of the former than the latter.

It does cover a lot of ground and gives one a detailed taste for what artificial intelligence(AI), and IA's (Intelligent Agents) created from AI technologies are, and more importantly, what they *could* be. That is, if all the suggestions in this book were followed, we might soon have really 'intelligent' software emerging from various quarters (like the Internet or Intranets).

It concentrates on explaining the essentials of the cognitive and computer sciences that are relevant to IA design and creation, especially the considerations that seem to have contributed to 'intelligence' in the natural world (like our brains). I liked all the various definitions of intelligence!

It goes into the details of various architectural approaches to designing systems of interacting, or collaborating components. I found the material on the necessity of common agent languages (that is, languages in which the agents speak to each other) to be particularly enlightening.

Also especially useful was all the information about autonomy, agent mobility, standards that agents can make use of (like IIOP), and what languages and environments might be particularly suited to IA implementation. There were a couple of subjects that seem, in retrospect, out of place (like OpenDoc). But given that the coverage is about certain architectural and implementation concepts of those subjects that were important to IAs, and that it was only a few pages, this was a minor issue with me.

The book explains, at a surface level, the common soft-computing technologies like ANNs, genetic computing and fuzzy logi! c, as well as more traditional approaches like expert systems. It gives examples of real software that you can buy and use to incorporate these techniques into agents. For example, the book provides a good synopsis of Cyc, which can be used by agents to incorporate 'common sense' reasoning capabilities.

I did not expect it, so I was not surprised that this was not a programming manual. There are a couple of other books on IAs that concentrate on particular kinds of relatively simple agents in particular languages. Yet, to be honest, in lieu of lots of specific code and examples of actual agents, it provides a lot of pointers to other researchers' works in companies and academic settings.

This book is much more than what has appeared on the market thus far. Its breadth is actually pretty amazing considering its length of around 400 pages. I would recommend it to anyone who wanted to either gain a good grounding in intelligent agent design and development issues, or to expand one's purview of how intelligence could be enabled within today's and tomorrow's distributed computer systems.

Intelligente Agenten sind längst nicht mehr nur ein Thema für abgedrehte Software-Entwickler. Microsoft ist in den Markt der Agent Software Produkte eingestiegen und die Regale der Buchhandlungen füllen sich mit Abhandlungen zu diesem Themenkomplex. Inhalt: Michael Kapnik und Jay Johnson beschreiben in Ihrem Buch die Architektur, Technologie und Anwendungen für Intelligente Agenten in ver-teilten Umgebungen. Die Autoren thematisieren nahezu alle Aspekte dieser Technologie. Künstliche Intelligenz in Experten Systemen, Fuzzy Logik, Objektorien-tierung und Architekturen von Agenten bilden den ersten Teil des Buches. Der Vergleich na-türlicher und künstlicher Intelligenz beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob Computer die Natur des Gehirns nachbilden können. Die Industriestan-dards CORBA, OpenDoc, OLE/ActiveX und DCE werden als Basis für die Infrastruktur intelli-genter Agenten kurz erleutert. Für Tools und Entwicklungsumgebungen geben die Autoren neben der theoretischen Beschreibung auch einen Marktüberblick über verfügbare Produkte und weiterführende Literatur zu den Tei-laspekten. Im Anschluß werden Design- und Sicher-heitspekte beschrieben. Dies umfaßt die Bereiche Anforderungsanalyse, Plattform, Umgebung und Paradigmen für verteilte Um-gebungen, Client/Server und Mobilität. Daneben werden Methoden zur Fehlerbe-handlung, digitale Signaturen und Konfigurationen durch die Endanwender dar-gestellt. Nachdem die Grundlagen für die Entwicklung der Agenten gelegt sind, beschäftigt sich das Kapitel "Developing Intelligent Agents NOW" mit Sprachen und Entwicklungsumgebungen, wie Java, Smalltalk und Telescript. Die Einsatzgebiete intelligenter Agenten sind vielfältig. Viele Anwender setzen sie bereits in Standard-Office-Produkten oder E-Mail-Anwendungen ein. Daneben unterstützen in-telligente Agenten ihre Anwender im Netzwerk-Management, bei der Suche im WWW, bei der Filterung von Daten, beim Kommunikations-management und vielen anderen Bereichen. Der Ausblick in die Zukunft intelligenter Agen-ten bi! ldet den Abschluß des Buches. Neben weiteren Anwendungsgebieten für Agenten in Datenbanken, im Netzwerkmanagement, in Suchmaschinen und im Privatbereich wird auch auf mögliche Gefahren durch spionierende oder destruktiv agierende Agenten hingewie-sen. Beurteilung: Sätze, wie "Mein Computer fühlt sich alleine, weil ich es bin" zeigen, daß es sich nicht um eine theoretische Abhandlung über die Agen-ten-Technologie handelt. Immer wieder stellen die Autoren einen praktischen Bezug her oder wagen einen Blick in die Zukunft. Es gibt je-doch auch Kapitel, die nicht so leicht zu lesen sind. Dies ergibt sich aus der Komplexität der behandelten Themen. Denn die Entwicklung intelligenter Agenten in verteilten Umgebungen ist nicht trivial. Das Buch liefert das "Handwerkszeug" für die Entwicklung verteilter Systeme mit Hilfe intelli-genter Agenten. Es schneidet alle relevanten Themen an, ohne dabei zu theoretisch zu wer-den. Aufgrund des Umfangs der behandelten Themen sind die einzelnen Technologien nicht erschöpfend dargestellt. Wer detaillierte In-formationen benötigt, kann jedoch auf weiterführende Literatur, auf die in dem Buch hingewiesen wird, zurückgreifen.

My introduction to Data Warehousing was a water cooler discussion with a colleague just returned from a Data Warehousing workshop. The main topic of that discussion was the long development time required by data warehousing projects and how foolish it was start any project where the first "deliverable" to a business user was planned for three years hence.

With the approach that Ms. Moeller presents in this book, however, data warehouse projects are made eminently manageable by planning a series of major deliverables spaced 3-6 months (not YEARS) apart - at a fraction of the cost of a full-blown "Data Warehouse." Data Warehousing projects no longer have to automatically connote the development of a "black hole."

Potential readers should be aware that this book is not a "how-to-do-it." Rather, it focuses on what has to be done and how to approach a Data Warehousing project in general.

One final note: having read Ms. Moeller's past articles in the journal "InfoDB", she continues to present very technical information in a lucid, clear writing style. I'm still amazed that I read each chapter straight through in one sitting. This is the first "technical book" I have read in a very long time about which I can make that statement.

What an asset to the Internet enabled Data Warehouse! As a consultant in the field, someone offering a practical solution to the Data Warehousing environment provided valuable insight that I can offer my clients. With Internet applications becoming more abundant and the volume of clickstream data reaching terabyte sizes, it is wonderful that the author offered a solution of distributing pieces of the data warehouse across different nodes. The authors' step-by-step process, that includes a valuable discussion on security, will assist in multiple environments but especially in the e-commerce arena.

R. A. Moellers approach in this book is extremely pactical. The author give usable examples on how to build a distributed data warehouse that could cross political boundardies. This is valuable to anyone building e-commerce applications that cross not only divisional boundardies but corporate boundaries. The chapter on security was especially interesting and helpful for an e-commerce situation as well.

If you are like me and you are frustrated after picking up an IT book and only getting superficial platitudes rather than keen insights, then you may be pleasantly surprised by this book because it really reveals, as the title states, the "Power of Events." The book starts off establishing the author's grounding in Enterprise Architectures (and their shortcomings), and then proceeds to build an intuitive foundation to seduce the reader into the world of events that they may not have realized was so much a part of distributed systems. While the formal notation used in the book may appear daunting, it is easily mastered and the subtle rules and mechanism are exposed through many thoughtful examples. I will say the second half of the book is a slower read than the 1st part, but the book should leave you with some confidence that there really are some breakthroughs in software technology that will have a positive impact on distributed IT System quality and the complex event processing shows that potential.

As IT infrastructure weaves itself into every aspect of a business, managing these systems becomes an imperative. The Lines of Business demand complete and the real time visibility into the IT infrastructure. Most systems developed do not allow the IT departments to manage at these levels. Dr Luckhams book propose a framework for managing this complexity. He puts forth, in a simple and readable manner how do manage systems by observing the "Cloud of Events" and how to build systems that are easier to manage.

It is the first book that I have come across that deals with the topic of IT management at a level that is not too abstract or complete focused on existing tools, instead Dr Luckham takes the reader much closer to a solution to the problem by getting them to think about the problem in the right way. He puts years of Stanford research into a readable form for the ordinary mortal. Bravo.

It is seldom that one comes across a software engineering book that is free of hype and doesn't cut corners when it comes to providing details. This book is a must-have for every software professional. You don't have to be working on a cutting edge project to benefit from this book. What this book teaches is a new way of critically thinking about complex software design and architecture. The book is masterfully written and as its Preface states, is the result of over a decade of hard-core research into event pattern matching conducted at Stanford University. This is a book that one can put to use right away, using tools and systems that are available today.

Very readable and highly useful book. One major hit. It is ironic that the author complains about the symbols in other books. For queueing he invents his own, instead of sticking with standard practices. This is very fustrating to readers that have other books on queueing and need to compare.

Although this book's full value will be realized if you understand the C programming language (he uses source code it illustrate points throughout the book and provides a C library for performance analysis on the accompanying disk), anyone with good math skills will gain much from this outstanding book.

The core approach is Performance By Design, which is aligned to product development. His approach, if used properly, will ensure that performance goals are established in the design phase, and are met as a system or software evolves through the development life cycle.

Highlights of the book are:
(1) Through introduction to the foundation of performance: queuing, parallelism and multiprocessor systems.
(2) Coverage of contemporary issues, such as client/server and web system performance,
(3) Unexpected forays into performance characteristics and considerations that I've encountered in no other book. For example, Part 3 of this book addresses subtle issues such as transient analysis, scaling behavior and similar topics. Here the author integrates theoretical physics into performance analysis - while this may seem odd, it only reinforces that much can be added to the performance analysis body of knowledge by drawing from sources outside of computer science. His qualifications for this material includes a Ph.D in theoretical physics, and his ability to clearly explain concepts that are foreign to the average computer scientist or performance practitioner is excellent.

I like the conversation style that the author employs, the way he starts with the basics and builds upon them and the thoroughness in which all aspects of performance are discussed. More importantly, although advanced math concepts are introduced the way they are presented can be understood by anyone with high school or college freshman knowledge of probability and calculus.

If understanding and managing computer systems performance is in your job description and you can only buy two books, this is one of the two (the other is Raj Jain's, "The Art of Computer Systems Performance..."). Neil Gunther's book is not just another tome on queueing theory. Immediately useful methods and formulas are presented in the context of real problems. The two chapters on instability in systems and scaling of multiprocessor systems alone make the book worth its price. Readers need to know that there is some math in the book (there is just no escaping it) and that some of the cited vendor products are becoming dated. The Web site associated with the book contains many items of current interest, an errata sheet correcting minor errors in the book, and downloadable programs related to performance evaluation.