Modeling

- Anupreet Singh

The book provides a breakdown of the major .NET topics including Web forms, Windows Forms, Data access, COM integration and Web services. Each of these topics is covered in its own chapter with helpful examples to illustrate the points covered. I found myself coding each of the examples in Visual Studio.NET and learning from each of them.

The examples are mostly complete, though the biggest challenge I had was getting the "Remoting" example in Chapter 6 to work. This was because of the need to associate a strong name with the assembly as well as register the assemnbly with the "sn" and "regsvcs" utilities. These required steps weren't obvious to me at first and weren't documented. Also, the authors state the examples could be built without VS.NET. In theory this is true, but impractical because of the associated files VS.NET creates on your behalf in projects.

Some of the highlights include the COM/.NET integration example, the Web Services example, the data type information from Chapter 2 and the excellent breakdown of the WDSL XML format in Chapter 7.

This book is not as high-level as some people might expect from the title. While "Understanding the .NET Framework" is an overview, it is still quite technical. Overall I found the book to be a great value for the purchase price.

There are some limitations as with any workbook. It would have been useful if the different water quality model input parameter tables were discussed at the beginning of their application chapters. Also, it would have been useful if there was a more extensive GUI, however, having all the input data in a simple tabular format is still useful.

The feature of putting the set-up and applications up front with the theory chapters at the end, rather than mixing them together is very helpful.

I will be recommending that this workbook be used in a senior level environmental sciences course for which I am trying to get more of a quantitative underpinning.

This book will be good for "new faces (a term used to describe a model who is just beginning)".

And Natasha covers everything there is to cover, -as usual.

The reason I only give it 4 stars, is that sometimes in order to understand an explanation, you will have to look up another word.

This volume, as of its writing in 2000, describes much of the engineering and theoretical underpinning of this field. It does not have the 802.11 standards that came out after 2000, but much of the book is still very germane. There is no lack of research interest in this field, driven in no small part by the anticipation that nomadic computer and the rise of the pervasive Web have yet to occur. Still early days for those, we hope.

The field contains tough issues, as may be seen in several papers in the book. In earlier decades, wireless communications were often to and from antennas at fixed locations, with ample power. Or, if the antennas were mobile, like on planes, usually power was not a consideration. Nor the possible maximum length of the antennas. But in modern personal mobile uses, the constraints are far tighter. Power must be minimized, and you cannot draw out a one meter antenna.

Which gives great potential for researchers like yourself to invent and commercialise new applications, if you can overcome these challenges, aided perhaps by ideas in this book!