Modeling

I am disappointed because I have been unable to access the wrox site for review of samples. I do not know what is wrong!

First book I've read and thought it deserves a 10, simply because of its direct impact to my everyday projects. The author has clearly used ASP himself. This is not your usual 'academic' approach to a subject. Great examples and specific details (like using redirection from within a page instead of the header). Takes the mystery out of global.asa and sessions. Great ADO info. Very project oriented, like user authentication discussion.

This book is the one you must have. The book assumes you have previous knowledge of VBScript. However, it is an excellent book both as a study material and as a reference. There are other books I have read on ASP, but none are as detailed as this. Good work Alex. - Manohar Kamath

I heard a lot of good things about Edward Tufte's books, and was told he was THE expert on graphics. When I was asked to read this book for work, I eagerly agreed and ordered it straight away. Now I'm sorry I wasted my time.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information is poorly organized, and Tufte contradicts himself in many places. He includes a quote from E. B. White recommending that writers trust in their readers' intelligence, yet he does not. Everything is broken down bit by bit so that the intelligent reader must skim over half the content of the book to avoid wasting his or her time. While the ideas behind the book are good, the voice is condescending and irritating. In addition, the bizarre layout of the book is heavily unbalanced; some pages have several inches of white space all the way down the right hand side of the page, while others are so full of text and graphics that it is difficult to tell to what the citations refer, giving the page a jumbled, disorganized appearance. This is disappointing; Tufte says in the introduction that he controlled the book's layout, yet he, an expert in the art of visual display, produces an unblanced and jumbled display? I am sorry I bothered reading this book, and would urge others to avoid it.

Quite insightful, especially the historic perspective. The only difference between the newer and 1983 edition is color is added to a few of the charts.

Instead I give this book regularly to my students & wish to goodness that more of my colleagues had copies. From the opening pages -where Tufte gives us 4 data sets that are statistically indistinguishable but graphicly at different points of the compass- through the beautifully rendered examples of classical and modern examples of meaningful graphics & "chartjunk" Tufte serves as a wry, witty, and informative guide to the perils & joys of informing or confusing an audience with charts and graphs.
Although in some ways a polemic against the misuse of graphical techniques, Tufte never loses his sense of humor & gives us plenty of really GOOD examples as well as a harsh deconstruction of some truly horrendous images. While this, the first in what has become a series, predates the muddy dawn of computer graphical "presentations" the basic principles outlined in its pages are every bit as applicable to the PowerPoint generation as they were to transparencies & posters. Buy it. read it Use it.

This book covers the complete life cycle including project management, requirements definition, technical architecture design, dimensional modeling, physical design, data staging, and finally deployment and maintenance. I think his approach to planning is a good one, and I am fighting to find the necessary business sponsor and a clear business motivation. Their approach to interviewing key players is a good way to collect requirements.

The importance of conformed dimensions and building a data warehouse bus architecture matrix is a great exercise. Some of the controversy with respect to his advocacy of denormalizing has to do with how "pure" your warehouse is. For example if I am merely providing analysis of production data or querying vertically across data marts, I would retain the data in normalized E/R, but present a more dimensional view to end users. I appreciated the discussion on back room versus front room metadata and using active metadata to drive operations. I was disappointed with the lack of discussion of warehouse testing with only a few pages on data quality and cleansing during data staging, and just one paragraph on balancing between the warehouse and production data. This book is very useful, and the accompanying CD will save time creating your own project documents.

After 21 years in software development, which includes managing three data warehouse projects, I had decided to write a book trying to capture whatever wisdom I had accumulated. After reading this book I no longer feel the need to.

This book not only provides detailed techniques for building a data warehouse and managing the process, it also deals with the realities faced in these projects. If you've ever been frustrated with those abstract tomes written by strict methodologists while you were burdened with a tight budget, a dysfunctional company (is that redundant?), immature technology, underskilled technologists and waffling user support -- then this is the book for you. It is filled with recommendations for conducting every phase of the project, yet is always careful to acknowledge that no two projects are alike and there is no one guaranteed blueprint for managing the project.

My only regret is that this book wasn't available before my first data warehouse projects. Although our teams ended up at many of the same conclusions, it was only after a lot of hard thought, insecurity, and trial and error.

If you are going to develop a data warehouse or a data mart, read this book first.

You won't find anything better on DW Project Management.
Covers everything from introduction to the subject, essential concepts through to recommended and proven industrial practices with checklists. You MUST read this book from cover to cover before attempting to start a DW project. It could make the difference between project success and failure.

If you are going to be involved in implementing a DW rather than only managing the project then it's definitely worth getting one of Kimball's other books (DW Toolkit/Data Webhouse Toolkit), which cover lower level aspects of designing and implementing a DW, although there is some overlap.

I bought this book only knowing a little about ADO.NET. I had been frustrated by other books' sterile explanations and examples that only include the most rudimentary data aware setup using wizards. But this one delivered, including a set of tutorials in the back that cover ADO.NET strategies for Windows, and Web/ASP VS.NET development. And not only did it cover setting up these strategies for using data aware components, but it stopped afterward and then admitted that in most cases you wouldn't use completely data aware solutions and it showed how to do the same thing manually in code. Now that is not what I expected.
So why only four stars instead of five? I got lost in the tutorials once. I was creating the app from scratch according to instructions when it deviated to overview of outstanding points of the code rather than exhaustive examination of the code. Then I had to open the sample projects and divine some of it from the code and compare to mine. That was probably my fault but it was distracting. Also the naming conventions are hungarian notation for some variables and control names (which is discouraged in newer C# VS.NET documentation) and the C# code had VB-type Pascal-case rather than correct Camel case. This is typical in most C# Microsoft documentation in books and online, which is obviously ported from VB to C# examples and doesn't follow documented recommended naming conventions (sorry, a pet peeve of mine).

This book was very instrumental in my leap from classic ADO to ADO.Net. The book is very easy to follow and gives good code examples. The book gives a great introduction to all the key principles of ADO.Net and won't leave you stranded without a clue.

The only downsides to this book are:
The book is written for both C# and VB.Net development and would have been very thin if not so. The book was a very quick read, only taking about 4 days to finish. More detail could have been given in the space taken. The other problem I had was that the cover of the book came unglued from the book when I was about 1/2 way through, which wasn't pleasing to say the least.
Lastly, some examples contain errors, which only slightly takes away from the greatness of the book.

Based on content and how easy it was to pick up on ADO.Net I have to give 4 stars.

I resumed programming last year after 12 years of doing none. Eight months and a ten books later, I'm doing great. This is definitely the book I refer to most often. I'm amazed how time and time again, I discover a new gem in a chapter I had only previously breezed through....and I can see that as my skills progress, there's even more waiting for me to absorb. David's writing is excellent, the examples (in both VB and C#) are perfect, and the content is thorough.

This is the Watergate of high fashion.

Award-winning investigative journalist Ian Halperin went undercover as a model to expose what goes on in the fashion industry off the runway when the lights and cameras go off. I read this book with my jaw on the floor. You will be outraged to read how beautiful young girls, some from poor countries and others red-blooded Americans with dreams of making it big, are prime targets of being sexually used, abused, perhaps murdered; they are made to go through things one wouldn't wish on their worst enemy. If you want to be a fashion model, this book will scare the living daylights out of you; if you believe this book doesn't relate to you, think of your daughter, your neice, your granddaughter.

In addition to Halperin's investigating the darker, lesser known sides of this industry, also included later on in the book are top notch, in-depth chapters of more publicized occurences in fashion recently: the untimely death of Gianni Versace, the Fashion Cafe, Niki Taylor's tragedy, the John Casablancas scandal.

It's tragic, as John Casablancas and the way he took advantage of his models is a sort of a tip of the iceberg to what is described in the first part of the book, and somehow what's below the surface has yet to be picked up by mainstream media and be prosecuted by authorities.

Also: insightful biographies of Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and other supermodels.

A well-rounded book, paced wonderfully and written skillfully.

This book rocks the fashion world. It reveals all the inner secrets behind the secrets of the fashion and modeling industry. And it is extremely well written. I highly recommend all fashion fans to consider Bad and Beautiful. The author posed undercover as a model to get the story. It is highly entertaining and investigative journalism at its best.

Mr. Halperin's excellent book fills a real need to expose the model industry for what it actually is. The book is full of highly informative case histories, and contains clear and understandable info on what it takes to survive in this gruelling business. This is an excellent book which I truly highly recommend.

Its like your actually in the class with other students. John Smiley wrote this book along-side a class he recently taught at Penn State University. For those who can't afford that quality of instruction (University quality) this is a minor breakthrough. Online support is incredible good, if you explore his home site you'll find out how involved he is with his students (both online students and Penn State University student). If your interested in learning MS Access as a back end to a Visual Basic 6 front end then this book is for you. I recommend buying his other book Learn to Program with Visual Basic 6 along with this one (you may want to start their before tackling this one). Your going to find it a lot more difficult if you don't start there (the reason is your building off of a previous project taught in his introductory level book). I didn't find much information on building VB Database Applications as web abled applications (where VB programming is heading) and that I would say is probable the only negative thing I could say about it and I also felt their should be more information on using a different back end for the database (back end means - database management software programs like Oracle or Foxpro) that might be used in larger corporation databases. This book is also great for a refresher for currently working VB database programmers that use MS Access and VB. I recomend you have Visual Basic professional edition and MS Access when using this book. You'll find plenty of support through John Smiley and other students.

This is an A+ book, if you want to learn database get it. But if you have no VB experience get his "Learn to program with Visual Basic", book first. This book was the second book I bought by Mr. Smiley. These books are written in a manner that relaxes one while reading. He has a program (the China shop) that you follow along with throughout his series. I am working on several programs for my college all involve a MS Access database I wrote several years ago, and I can not tell you how many time I have used this book as a reference. Mr. Smiley uses the DAO data access object instead of the ADO; he does reference the ADO and explains that once you learn DAO you can quickly learn ADO. Perhaps if you are looking for ADO you might try a different book. However, Mr. Smiley uses a straightforward logic and does not take the side trips that become so confusing in many programming books. He stays on databases and how to create them. Thanks, for your effort John.

Let me begin by saying that I'm the author, so let's get that out of the way.

I'm posting here to point out that the book has a tremendous amount of support materials that have never been advertised. Each of my books has a support page containing a current list of errata, downloadable files (completed exercises from the book), extra links to extra materials I have written and my email address in the event you have problems. I also run a series of online classes so that if you would like to learn with me in a more structured setting, you can do that also. You can access those materials via this link

http://www.johnsmiley.com/books.htm

I should also say that this book isn't for everyone---and you can read through some of the other reviews posted here to see why and why not.

I wrote this book for beginner level programmers, and the book is written in a unique style.

You (and I) can thank the now defunct Wrox Publishing house for the style of the book that some people absolutely love and others (primarily hotshot programmers with lots of experience) hate. The book is written as if you are participating in an actual classroom---many people, particularly those learning on their own or in an Independent study setting find comforting.

My thanks to the many people who have written to me to tell me how much they've enjoyed my books and how they have helped them achieve their goals of learning to program.

John Smiley

A word of warning. . .computer graphics books age like milk, not wine. The graphics here are considerably _worse_ than what you'd get out of a consumer grade product like Metacreations Poser-- not to mention 3D Studio or Softimage.

At the time this was written, it may have been useful, but you can spend your time and money more productively now.

3D Human Modeling and Animation is an indispensable reference for anyone (beginner to expert) wanting to create realistic characters in digital 3D worlds. Mr. Ratner's new book covers almost every critical aspect of creating and animating digital characters. It contains individual sections on each major body part, as well as numerous modeling and animation techniques (including useful student exercises). I wish I'd had this book years ago. It would have saved loads of time and helped avoid many unnecessary headaches.

Michael Limber, Angel Studios, Carlsbad, CA

Great for most 3D Modeling and Animation software! I found this book to be very versatile and great for organic modeling. Our studio uses LightWave 3D, which functioned quite well with the book. His setup for a human skeleton worked perfectly with this software. As far as features that my software package didn't support yet, such as lofting, it was easy to find replacement or equivalent techniques, such as rail extrude, to accomplish the tasks. I could see that this book would work exceptionally well with programs that are spline or NURBS based, such as Maya, SoftImage, Rhino, Form Z, Strata Studio Pro, Presenter 3D, etc. He outlines unique methods for modeling with NURBS, splines, and MetaNURBS. His techniques for constructing models are very original. I learned a lot from them. There are so many color and black and white illustrations that you could just follow these without even reading the text! I was impressed by the quality of the student work, which obviously proves that his methods are effective. I found it easy to adapt this book to the software that I'm using, Lightwave 3D. It's an amazing book!

Mike Rich, Success Media, Los Angeles, California

These days New York is filled with so many out of towners that you get to missing the New York accent on the streets of the city. This novel takes me back to the days of the 80s when I was taking the 7 train to the Met game or going the other direction for some forbidden fun at the pinball halls in Times Square. We went to bars in Woodside and roamed the East Village going to crazy industrial music clubs.

Dito's memoir about a kid from Astoria who forms a band and has great adventures in the big city rings true. He lived life with the pedal to the metal and somehow came out unscathed with lots of valuable memories.

Like Mike Tenaglia's book Anti-Hero, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is for anyone who wants to get the feel of New York City when a one bedroom on Avenue A went for $$$a month, three card monte dealers were the big attraction in Times Square and the subway was free on New Years Eve. Those were the days...

Pure Magic!

I have followed it like a map to stars home. A twisted street map through the dirty streets full of ghost from the 80's. Unfortunately every time I pin point an exact location from the book there seems to be a KMART standing there! Or a Duane REED DRUG STORE!!!!! What a time it must have been. I can't think of a more exciting time to have been down and out and somehow savoring all the madness for US in the future to read. Like a delinquent time capsule A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS paints a most beautiful portrait! the only true documentation I've found of Inner City life during this time.

god damit. I loved this book. I like the old New York. Better. Than the NEW new York. Mustach don't cut it. Nomore. Yeah, I like champagne. Blue light blue. Sunday brunch at two. Greased back, slicked back, all black LEATHER. Hey funny bird, cabbie on the street. Ohai, Lorie, and Lisa Marie. I love it all. New York City baby.

I have several books on Linux but I found this one the most useful. In the beginning when I run my Linux network server, I was in a hassle as it was not easy to follow the documents of Linux, they were so fragmented! However, this book guided me how to step my step familar with Linux. It was so clearly written that it could make a beginner become an expert after finishing the whole book! Now, I placed it near my Linux server for my daily reference. I suggest people who are uncertain of how to start reading this book!

I went through the book. Every topic is very clear and well organized. I had never done any sendmail smtp server setup before. After I finished Chapter 7 and 13, I could really did it. I highly recommend this book for network administrators and people who want to learn Linux networking.

Although I am still a novice user, I found that this book will improve make my knowledge/skills even better. If you are serious to deploy Linux, buy this

I highly recommend this book to any aspiring financial analyst. It is definitely worth it, even at the list price.

Want to master the fundamentals of basic finance using Excel? then this is one of the few books on the market that really meet this need. Want to set up more advanced mathmatics modeling? well as the introduction of this explains, this book is more like a cookbook: it lists the required basic ingredients and the culinary process but if you want to spice the dish (financial model) up, it is up to the individuals to dig out those advanced formulas from the financial trade journals and apply them to the models.

I first saw the first edition of this book in my college library. took it home and was EXCITED. I was looking for a practical book that would show me the intricacies of Excel for setting up financial models and this was like a god-sent. Like one of the other reviewers said, this book combined basic finance, Excel functions, and VBA programming. To add practicality to this book, Professor Benninga even showed how to download financial data from the internet. Granted it is rather basic, but it adds to the usability of his book, making it a well-round book.

The best parts are end-of-the chapter exercises. Solutions are provided in the accompanying CD-ROM. See how many ways can you solve the same problem.

Professor Benninga always outlines the assumptions and explains the parameters of each model. We should remember that in many instances, unrealistic assumptions lead to way-of-the mark numbers, rendering the whole modeling process and its calculations useless.

Want to become a advanced-level financial modeler? then master the fundamentals first! this book gets you started.

P.S. I also highly recommend to anyone just starting with Excel modeling to read William J. Orvis's Excel for Scientists and Engineers. It is a bit outdated but still highly useful for its chapters on curve fitting, VBA programming and raw data manipulation.

If you need to build a working valuation model, calculate the risk of a portfolio with 100+ securities, or figure out what return you might expect to get from a portfolio of high-yield bonds, then you'll find Simon Beninga's "Financial Modeling" merits far more than five stars: this is one book that is indispensable.

One of the biggest problems I ran into during my MBA program was the way my professors taught Corporate Finance. I had great profs, true, but they were teaching theoretical concepts from theoretical textbooks. Sure, you learned the basics: CAPM, net present value, basic options and futures, Arbitrage Pricing Theory, VAR and TEV, but I have always maintained that the best way of learning a subject---particularly corporate finance---is by getting your hands dirty and digging into the guts of the material.

Since Corporate Finance, off-balance sheet instruments aside, isn't very dirty, the best way to get a hands-on practical approach in terms of Capital Structure, the appropriate discount rate to use in pricing an asset, risk, and optimal debt and dividends is to program in Excel and Visual Basic. The problem is that many top finance texts don't offer supplemental material to translate the theoretical concepts into actual valuation and spreadsheet models, which any financial analyst will contend is the life-blood of the industry.

With that in mind, Simon Beninga's "Financial Modelling" is a kind of "Joy of Cooking" for initiate investment bankers, corporate financiers, controllers, analysts, and anyone who wants to use core Corporate Finance concepts in the real world. Beninga goes through the standard laundry list of Corporate Finance text topics---from the optimal risky portfolio to the term structure of interest rates---and shows you how to translate these concepts into workable spreadsheet models that can illustrate, illuminate, and get to the heart of a problem.

If you're a new MBA or financial analyst, you'll find much to love in Beninga's approach, and by pairing the newly expanded 2nd edition up with a top theoretical finance textbook (Ross, Westerfield et al.'s "Corporate Finance" is a fine example) you'll get the most out of your MBA program and have a solid foundation for building Excel and Visual Basic financial models that work.

I liken "Financial Modeling" to a cookbook, in that Beninga provides all the ingredients necessary to the model at hand: he begins with a sprinkling of theory, whether it's modeling a bond portfolio's immunization, calculating the cost of capital, estimating a portfolio's Beta with no short-selling, or pricing put and call options using both the binomial theorem and Black-Scholes. His writing is spare, terse, and to the point, but I have learned more about advanced corporate finance theory through Beninga's marvellously pithy writing and copious Excel examples than I have in reading ten 'top of the list' finance books.

In addition to nicely expanded sections on options (including portfolio insurance) and leasing (including the technically sophisticated subject of leveraged leasing, which requires Excel to comprehend), Beninga concludes his sprightly little tome with a section on getting the most out of Excel (useful little shortcuts that a financial analyst will need but may not have heard of) and a nice little introductory primer on programming in Visual Basic.

"Financial Modeling" is an absolute essential if you're going to make Corporate Finance your profession. For an equally elegant and practical treatment of building discounted cash flow models for businesses, the reader would be advised to pick up Beninga's "Corporate Finance", which, while not equally oriented in spreadsheet modeling, is one of the most terse, accessible, and reasonably technically sophisticated Corp-Fin books on the market today.

This is is spectacularly effective guide to basic financial modelling using Excel and VBA. Far too many financial textbooks confine themselves to theory without giving the student any guidelines on how to put what they have learned into practice - a startling omission in what is a pre-eminently practical field. Benninga has attempted to fill that gap, and he succeeds brilliantly. Using very clear language and a step-by-step approach, he teaches the reader how to actually construct for himself or herself a series of different financial models that are immediately applicable in the real world. There are sections on corporate finance (cash flow) models, basic portfolio models (CAPM applications) and a really good one on option pricing models that has saved my bacon on more than one occasion! Other sections cover topics such as fixed income and Excel/VBA issues. In conclusion, this is a very impressive text, complete with usable models on CD-ROM, that can take you from novice to mid-level quant in a few weeks!