Modeling

This was very helpful book, full of examples. I like the writer's style, which is concise and moves right ahead. However, I wish that Jim used an increasingly popular method to reference the code-- with colored numbers or something to help call out which line he was explaining. His explanations got bogged down a bit by the way he referenced his own code blocks. Visually beefing this up, would have been welcomed.

I found his brief notes and tips to be useful advice- delivered from an experienced programmer to a beginning to intermediate coder. The majority of these were useful points. Authentiction and ADO stuff was good, but I needed more sources as well.

It took me some effort to find this MSPRESS edition. I do hope that MSPRESS hasn't discontinued this and that a new revision is in the works. Reccomended.

This is a great starting point for anyone looking to take their database to the web. Of course, if you have some prior knowledge of ASP and VBscript, it makes it much easier. Although I have many years of VB and SQL Server experience, I still read this in its entirety and found some great info for taking some of the DB's at my job to our corporate intranet and across the internet.

This book takes you step by step (as the title implies) from designing your database (predominantly in Access although he explains how to connect to other databases) to getting it accessible through the web. The examples are great and they tend to build on each other. By the end of the book you should have a good foundation to design any type of data driven website you can imagine and password authenticate it as well.

If you are starting out and you are using Microsoft software, then this is a literal cookbook for web database success. Kudos to Jim Buyens for putting out an informative book that reads quickly.

This was money well spent! I am a college student who has had one database class and one object-oriented programming class (C++). I also have a copy of this author's "Running FrontPage 2000" book. Armed with those, I am very quickly on my way to having an impressive first-ever database-driven Web site--and I'm enjoying the learning process.

Mr. Buyens does a good job of introducing and overviewing database design/construction and VBScript considering these are part of the cookbook, but not the topic of it.

I wanted to build a Microsoft-driven database-driven Web site, and Mr. Buyens has provided the book I needed, in a format that is working very well for me: a cookbook with good insight (into the technologies involved).

The only other book I considered before buying this one was "Beginning ASP Databases." I sincerely doubt that it's as step-by-step as this book, and that's a feature I really wanted.

There's really not much to this book that isn't already in the Books Online, I'm afraid. I'm a professional programmer, I've been using DAO, ODBC, RDO, DAO for years. I bought this book looking for "best practices" for ADO. (Since there are so many ways of doing things, what are the drawbacks and advantages to each?) What I found was a lot of repetition of the help file, with occasional insights (how to optimize the Sort property, for example).

As an example, consider this: One of the trickiest things with ADO is dealing with CursorLocation, CursorType, and LockType, especially when you're not aware what OLEDB provider your code will be using. Sceppa writes: "...What's a database developer to do? With a little experience and a lot of reading, you'll develop a good feel for which combinations are possible and which aren't... [Y]ou'll probably explore different options and experiment with code, and along the way you'll inadvertently discover the answers to questions such as these." Well, Mr. Sceppa, I didn't buy the book to be told to "experiment" and hope for a discovery; these are the answers I had hoped the book would contain. If you'd spent fewer pages repeating the method and property lists, you might have been able to include some of this information.

If you dont have access to microsoft library then you can probably buy this book. its nothing but just the API reference. The foreword gives an illusion of getting interested but when the chapter comes its again refrence. and "Questions That Should Be Asked More Frequently" section is good, but i aint worth to buy the book just for that....

I literally use this book everyday troubleshooting clients ADO problems. I have other ADO books on my shelf but David's explanation of ADO's functionality plus his insight and suggestions on how to code with ADO make this book my number one ADO resource. As other reviewers have said the ADO documentation is lacking in many areas and David has filled in these gaps with his extensive knowledge of the technology and his own hard won experience.

Here is an example of David's insight, experience, and humor when it comes to dealing with ADO Cursors, "Back-end databases, OLE DB providers, ODBC drivers, CursorLocations, CursorType, LockType, CommandType, oh my! What's a database developer to do? With a little experience and a lot of reading, you'll develop a good feel for which combinations are possible and which aren't." This quote of from Chapter 7 Cursors, Foiled Again and the section is titled You Can't Always Get What You Want. In this chapter David does a great job of guiding us developers through what is known and what is not know about this part of ADO. It is this type of guidance and insight that I want the most when I am developing new ADO applications and when I am troubleshooting ADO code.

If you have any dealings with ADO then you simply must get this book.

Anyone that has been modeling very long will see this book for what it is ... after you look at it once, you'll put it on your bookshelf and leave it there. Save yourself the money ... There are much better reference books available. Try David Hay's book on patterns, or Len Silverston, or Graeme Simsion. Check out the DAMA reference guide .. at least it's built by actual practitioners.

The help screens on the Data modeling tools are more advanced in explaining data modeling than this book.

Probably great for theorists - managers or teachers that don't know what they are doing! But the real modelers will seek help elsewhere.

The authors deny the fifth normal form and state special-case rules as if they were universal. Examples: Eliminate triads; Two entities cannot have more than one relationship. Although in some specific situations the advice might be valid, anyone who is trying to learn from the reading will be misled. Less harmful, even interesting, for a professor (to learn how not to approach the teaching of DB modeling).

Poor, underdocumented examples. Oversimplification. Unfortunately at the time I had only the title to choose from. Good thing most books now have a table of contents.

Database modeling still doesn't have strong references as database theory does (Date's, Ramakrishnan's, Elmasri's only to cite three). There are excellent theoretical (Thalheim's "Entity-Relationship Modeling" is good) and philosophical approaches (finally they re-published Kent's opera-prima "Data and Reality", fabulous).

The picture is poor when it comes to hands-on modeling. Bruce's "Designing Quality Databases..." is an exception. Good and useful for someone who is developing modeling expertise. But I especially don't recommend Reingruber&Gregory's book.

This book is excellent. The subject matter is advanced but still easy to read and understand. The examples used in the book are varied and excellent illustrations of the problems discussed in the book. Many of the examples remind me of similar data modeling errors I have seen in my experience and give excellent methods of correcting the mistakes. I highly reccomend this book for the data modeler who is ready to go to the more advanced conecpts. (You must know basic data modeling concepts to understand this book, such as how to read diagrams, basic terminology, etc.)

It's difficult to get interesting
literature related to this theme.

On the one hand there are some books written for managers, on the other hand there are some pretty mathematical books for academics. But this book is the best mix. You get an introduction to data mining and learn step by step from the basics up to the hard algorithm stuff with nice examples.
There is a clear theme structure, and the deep technical sections are marked, so you can read what you are most interested in. The book describes not only one algorithm, but a lot of them and discusses plusses and minuses. Where it's necessary it uses simple diagrams to illustrate something, not so much that it looks like they want to fill the pages, like in other books. Best of all, the algorithms are implemented as an
open source java software named "weka". This is my state of the art data mining tool.
You can see the algorithms working and use the implementations for your ideas (like me). If you are hungry to learn more
about one or the other thing, the book provides a literature list.

For me this book was one of the best books in the last years, because it provides the best mix and gives you a fast but deep view in this theme.

Over the last 3 years our company has bought 15+ copies of this book and have given it to our new employees to help them gain a practical perspective when writing machine learning applications. The book is filled with practical insights and gems learnt from real data analysis experience. We have read almost all other data mining and machine learning books and have standardized on this book. Although the book is great, the software is amazing! Weka (the name of the software that is described in the book and is available for free) contains the largest collection of machine learning algorithms available in a coherent package. The software is written in Java and we have used it under a variety of platforms. Weka is incredible, and when combined with the well written explanations I have to give this book top marks. I'm looking forward to the next edition.

I've been working with "big name software" for some years, but when I joined the institution I work now and no tools where available I begun my quest for an open source tool that could help me build statistical models applied to real business problems.

As a result of this quest I found the WEKA data mining software on the Internet (you can find it on www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~ml/weka/) and that nice piece of software leaded me to this book.

This book is EXCELLENT and I am giving 5 *five* stars to it as it helped me understanding the whole process of datamining: from loading the data to building the model.

I've read some reviews and I think some of them are not fair (particularly one that says that this book have "just words with no relation or sense at all").. THIS BOOK IS REALLY WELL WRITTEN but you have to read it slowly: As when you study something.

Buy this book (*don't forget to download the software*) and I am totally sure that you will be producing and using models in a week.

Can't imagine that some weeks ago

Cheers,

Yup, review of books online is a lost cause. How many times have I bought a book which looked interesting and substantial only to end up with sloppy editing, crappy tutorials, poor writing, uninspiring artwork, and a huge dollar sign on its dust jacket that made me lose a quarter of my arm and leg?

More often than once. That was the case with this book.

Lessons learned? Reading reviews online is a tricky affair. Usually, the attacks are personal. They may find the book hogwash but it might just be the right one for you. Others might even have a violent reaction to the book not because it was really a trashy book to begin with but only because the reviewer misses the whole point. Imagine a raffia hobbyist reacting to a book on Javascript for Rocket Scientists and Engineers.

So no matter how advanced information technology has become there is still no better substitute for fondling the physical diomensions of a book in your local bookstore and reading it at length to have a better grasp of its usability. I know it is hard but walking is such a great exercise it will strengthen your cardiac muscles and save you hours of writing acerbic reviews of books which did not meet your expectations.

May I also remind you this book is a rehash of an old material the author has written almost eight years ago. Nothing much has improved. The author obviously is finding a way to resell an old book by coming up with a new cover but the change is clearly a cosmetic one as the contents are still MEDIOCRE.

You are better off buying Jason Osipa's book. I have it and it is brilliant both for beginners and professionals.

And, please, stay away from all Bill Fleming books on modelling and texturing digital characters. His models look so plasticky. With CGI written all over its pixels. I bought them a few years ago when I was still a fresh-faced newbie. Now they are under my bed gathering molds with my old copies of National Geographic.

I hope I helped you save some money. Support your jobless but very talented friends with it.

This book is definitely at the top of my list as one of the most useful 3D texts that I have reviewed. It is so jam packed with information and illustrations that it will probably take me 3 years to go through it. It must have taken the author twice that long to study the complexity involved with computer animation.
I found that Mr. Ratner covers the most popular modeling techniques such as subdivision surface, NURBS, and
spline modeling. He has the reader start modeling simple objects and gradually builds up to humans. After learning how to model, he shows how to rig up humans for animation. Lighting and texturing is also covered.

Details such as making hair, teeth, eyes, etc. are also in the book and make it complete for the beginner and advanced illustrator to take note of his advice. He even includes an anatomy chapter. He must have been a med student at one time or had one of those plastic see through human figure models where you can take out individual organs. Another chapter tells how to make morph targets for facial expressions and dialogue. He tells readers which basic facial morphs are made (about 50) that lets them create thousands of others by blending variations of them. There is a lot of information about animation techniques and principles. The color insert has human model illustrations from well-known artist around the world. This book
has too much in it to do it justice in one little review.

Creating the human figure in art is hard enough with paint or clay let alone 3D software. In his new book, 3-D Human Modeling and Animation, 2nd Edition, Peter Ratner builds the reader up to the task by introducing the concepts with simple, easy to construct models, then simple characters and finally the human figure. By the end of the book your models will be walking and talking. Quite an accomplishment.

Someone using the UML to model, should use the User Guide. I think it the most usefull UML book at the moment. The Reference Manual promises to be more than the User Guide, while, in fact, it delivers less. The Reference Manual is filled with some good explanations about the use of the UML, but beware, it surely is NO reference manual. First, what version of the UML is described? It's not in the book. Second, some (basic) things are not described in the book. Third, the book contains errors. OK, the UML is to difficult to be described in a single book (that's why at this moment you can at least buy 20 books that (suprisingly) all describe about the same portion of the UML), but even basic things are excluded. An example? Try to find the definition of "class attribute" or "class operation". Yes, in fact you can find it, if you're keen enough to look in the index and think that it will probably be listed under "class-scope". But when reading that paragraph, you'll never see how to model class-scope properties. The class operation is modelled somewhere during the discusion of classes, the class attribute is never modelled in the book. I'm using the book for a week now, and I am very disappointed. I'm hardly using it anymore, instead I returned to using the User Guide and the original UML specifications.

I was expecting a dry through explanation of notation. This book is not that at all. This was by design though.

The book attempts to cover all of the important topics. To get there, it takes an unusual approach. There are a few introduction chapters as might be expected. Part 2 of the book has one chapter per view. In each chapter, the view is covered both notation-wise and discussion-wise.

Part 3 was the biggest surprise for me. It is an "encyclopedia of terms." This section is worthwhile even if you are an OO person who doesn't care about diagramming with UML. It gives a definition for each term and frequently the Semantics, Notation and Discussion associated with it.

However, this book is a rough read. I opened the book randomly and found the following as an example: "Branch: An element in a state machine in which a single trigger leads to more than one possible outcome, each with its own guard condition." After reading it a second time carefully along with looking up what a "guard condition" was, I understood. The point though is that the definitions are rigorous, but hard to digest on a quick read.

The book is worth buying for your reference library for the encyclopedia section alone. I will personally be using it when I have a situation to model and know the term but not the UML syntax. The encyclopedia will lead me to the syntax.

I do a lot of UML modelling, and I keep this book by my desk at all times. It has in-depth information, is well-written, and is well-organized.

The Reference Manual and the Users Guide are generally sold as a pair. Quite frankly, if you have the Reference Manual, then you don't need the Users Guide.

If you are just learning UML and are already familiar with any formal design methodologies, then you can do just fine with the Reference Manual alone. However, if you are new to graphical modeling in general, you may want to buy "UML for Dummies" to serve as a useful introduction.

Basic concepts are, I think, well presented. This is terribly important because even those of us who are used to working with web applications might find Zope very different from anything we've used before. This would earn it four stars except for one serious flaw: the book is rather dated. There is no coverage at all of Zope Page Templates or METAL, which are very important topics in today's Zope.

I reduced the rating to three stars because of essential deployment topics that I wanted to see covered that were also completely missing. SSL, the zope.conf file, using Zope in conjunction with Apache, for example. There's probably more, but I just don't know yet that I don't know them.

So I give it three stars for being useful, but having significant flaws. You are better off going to Zope.org and getting the latest on-line docs from there.

Although Zope may be the leading open source Web content management platform, it has suffered from a lack of comprehensive documentation. This book, and similar titles from Linux Journal Press and Sams, have begun to address this issue, hopefully bringing greater interest in the platform.

The Zope Book was written by Zope developers and is targeted at Web developers and admins who have some experience with Web applications but possibly not content management technology.

Part 1, Introducing Zope, is designed to get the reader started with Zope, explaining how to download, install, and configure the software using the platform's graphical interface. The section describes what Zope can do, explains the basics of the Zope content object model, and introduces Zope's server-side templating environment, Document Template Markup Language (DTML).

Part 2, Creating Web Applications with Zope, gets into the meat of actually making Zope applications. The section talks about scripting with Python and Perl, user security searching, connecting to a variety of relational databases, metadata, and advanced DTML.

Part 3, Developing Advanced Web Applications with Zope, covers the Zope Enterprise Objects model, scaling and extending Zope, and Zope classes.

Appendixes include DTML and Zope API references and a guide to Zope resources, including mailing lists and Web sites.

The Zope Book is not the ultimate Zope refernce, and isn't meant to be.

Within the last years, the web has become a somewhat serious business. Complex websites no longer use static, hard to update html pages, information is less and less stored in a plain filesystem like we are used to with our personal files.

Sharing ideas with hundred, millions of people (I mean creating a web presence!) involves at least 3 backend elements :

- a database,
- a server,
- a "gluing" language

Zope provides the three in the same application, perfectly integrated and quite easily deployed (respectively Zodb, Zserver, and Python)

What was needed for zope recognition as a good candidate for "out of the box", opensourced, and efficient development plateform, was a good book that would introduce the whole tool for newbies as well as experienced web developers. In short, anyone looking for something more innovative than the traditional solutions (php/apache/mysql on the opensource side / asp/IIS, sqlserver on the commercial side ...)

The book realy helps to "take a grip" at Zope. You'll quickly learn the benefits of a totally object oriented approach (look at the poor object oriented approach of other web scripting tools, such as php, asp or coldfusion), and more importantly, *how* to use the tool.

Chances are that this book won't suffice for realy complex implementations (like creating custom products), but imho Zope is more a "concept" than any other tools, and *understanding* the concept is the key to successfull implementations.

Beside the differents chapters (with each speaking about a particular domain of Zope), you'll find a complete reference of the Zope API, and it's templating language, DTML.

After the reading of this this book, I feel ready for more complex implementations of web applications. That's just what I was looking for. I'd say I'm quite pleased.
As usual, your comments are welcome!

The writer is a complete idiot. He is nothing more than a headshot photographer (and not a particularly talented one at that), and writes at a first-grade level.

This book is worthless trash.

Get this book! It is a wonderful introduction to the field of modelling and commercial acting. The information is accurate and insightful. The book turns wannabes into informed, prepared competitors! As an adult male, I find the book particularly helpful, as it is not pitched toward pre-teenage girls like many other excellent books. The step by step approaches to getting photos, contacting agents, going to go-sees and auditions, were great. I am now with a great agency, have booked both print and TV commercial work (as a SAG principal, no less...), and am pursuing acting as well. This book has prepared me well and I highly recommend it.

I stumbled onto this book as a total idiot to the world of modeling. I followed its steps as far as to contact Karl. After talking to him for only a few minutes I knew he was giving me the "Real Story" on the business. His advice as a photographer and as a model has helped me get a confident start on a promising career. This book cuts through the smoke and mirrors and gives the reader the realistic approach to the business. This small investment will save you literally thousands of dollars in starting a modeling career as well as educating you on all the scams, and illegitimate agencies that paint a newcomer a false picture. A must read for all wannabe models and parents who are interested in a Modeling career for their child.

I have been searching a long time for a book (or article) that covered the Microsoft solutions suite for e-commerce but had no luck. Finally, a collegue of mine at work recommended this to me and I'm glad to say that my search has finally ended.

This book explains how all the different microsoft technologies piece together and the functions each of them serve. There were certain things I didn't quite like about the book however. I thought the chapter covering asp and html was unnecessary as you cannot pack those two into a single chapter each. That would have dropped some weight and $$ off this book too.

If you are looking to learn about e-commerce infrastructures and also what it takes to set up a site using the microsoft dna, then this is THE book to refer to. You do not have to read this chapter by chapter (I didn't) as each chapter is self-contained.

And here's something else you might find useful too. If you are about to implement a site using the microsoft dna, then go the http://www.microsoft.com/seminar site too. Much of this book is covered by those free online seminars and you'll also get handy security and performance tuning tips (but still get the book, it's a good one to read on the bus/train).

Good Luck !

I have been searching a long time for a book (or article) that covered the Microsoft solutions suite for e-commerce but had no luck. Finally, a collegue of mine at work recommended this to me and I'm glad to say that my search has finally ended.

This book explains how all the different microsoft technologies piece together and the functions each of them serve. There were certain things I didn't quite like about the book however. I thought the chapter covering asp and html was unnecessary as you cannot pack those two into a single chapter each. That would have dropped some weight and $$ off this book too.

If you are looking to learn about e-commerce infrastructures and also what it takes to set up a site using the microsoft dna, then this is THE book to refer to. You do not have to read this chapter by chapter (I didn't) as each chapter is self-contained.

And here's something else you might find useful too. Much of this book is covered by those free online seminars and you'll also get handy security and performance tuning tips (but still get the book, it's a good one to read on the bus/train).

Good Luck !

this is only book that i can buy in china which about site server.I want to find a book about site server for long time ,and now ,i find it. if you want to learn someting about site serve, you can buy it .if you want to master site server, you can throw it.

I bought this book (rather skimpy size) and win2000 clustering (bigger) book to try and tackle several clusters I am to build in 2003 EE. Thanks GOD I bought the 2000 book also. Much of the usable information came from the 2000 book, not the 2003 book. The 2000 book goes right at 2000 clusters, and covers them in detail. This 2003 cluster book spends half the paper rehashing 2000 clusters and then begins showing some of the differences in 2003. Half of the smaller 2003 book is about 2000 clusters. If you do not read the whole book, in order, you cannot build a cluster in 2003. 2003 clustering seems more like an afterthought than the main concern. I also am trying to build IIS6 failover clusters. This book mentions IIS clusters, not at all, nowhere. In 2000 clusters, IIS is a checkoff. In 2003 there is nary any clear documentation on it anywhere, especially this book. While SQL seems to be covered in the 2003 book there seems to be an absence of other program types.
This book lacks any detail on many subjects and omits critical ones entirely.
If you want a technical reference, how to book, this is not it.
Shame. Its currently the only one out there for 2003 clusters.

This is without a doubt, the most poorly-written technical reference I've ever had the displeasure of reading. I agree with the other reviewer who picked out the numerous Windows 2003 Server errors - this book was rushed to press, and should have waited for the final release instead of being based on RC2.

I cannot believe a professional editor gave this book their stamp of approval. I have to take breaks every dozen or so pages, not because the concepts are too difficult, but because the author's akward sentences make my head ache.

Unfortunately, this seems to be the only book on the subject. I would stick to using whitepapers and web resources.

In the sea of Windows Server 2003 titles surfacing, It is nice to see that at least one book, has come out by ONE author speaking from experience. I have noticed in the other books I have read, many others are having the same problems I am, the books are rushed out so 40 people write them and most of these folks have no production experience on the product so the books are pretty much a rehash of other stuff. They are rushed out, and we suffer. This book is nothing like that. The author has helped me understand exaclty what I wanted to know: how to plan a Windows 2003 upgrade from 2000 so that I can use my clusters and load balancing. Here are my favorite highlights about this book -> written from experience. You can tell the author works in the field as 90 percent of what is written comes from real life examples. You can tell that the author is not biased towards Microsoft technologies. The author tells you when he is working on something in production, he tells you when he is working in a lab. He clearly tells you the good and the bad. Another great thing is that this book is written on both the techie level and the managment level. I am a manager of a medium network, and I needed what was in this book which was tons of project planning guidance, what to buy, how to test it and so on. My last nice thing to say is that I loved how this book also took a focus on hardware for once. Too many authors write with no valid expeience so you miss all the hardware gotchas out there that people like me (in the trenches everyday and weekends) has to deal with. Not this one. You will know from when you start this book to when you put it down (thanks also that its only about 400 pages) how to design, cost estimate, implimenent, test and monitor your clusters. I loved the fact that I picked up tips on how to get free pre-sales support to help design my cluster with the vendor, it saved me some cash too on consulting which also helps. Ok, now here are the cons. Wish there was more of a focus on IIS. Another reviewer also mentioned this, so I will also say that as well because that would have put this book on my shelf forever. I agree and wish there was more on IIS. Other than that, the book gives you exaclty what it says it will, to help you plan and deploy a Windows 2003 cluster and load balanced solution and you will know how to upgrade your 2000 boxes without destroying them in the process. No stone is left unturned as the author makes certain you do not miss anything there is to know and there is even a section on how to back up your system so you dont kill it in the upgrade process.