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Resources - Book Bytes |
| by Stephen M.H. Braitman - NBMA Director of Communications Book Bytes announces new publications of interest to our members and community in multimedia, technology, business, and culture. First appearance of each Book Bytes column is in the NBMA email events newsletter. To subscribe, send a blank email message to: nbmaevents-subscribe@yahoogroups.com. If you have a recommendation for review — and, especially, if you have published a book — send the information to . |
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May 2003 ARTFUL MAKING: What Managers Need To Know About How Artists Work Rob Austin and Lee Devin 201 pages, $24.95 Financial Times/Prentice Hall www.ft-ph.com Creatives will sigh in collective relief that a book on this subject has been published. For too long art designers, Web developers, illustrators, writers, and other "creative content" contributors in the business and technology worlds have gotten short shrift from their MBA-and-less managers and directors. Art and content have always been the short-sighted "first fired" category among business executive decisions when it comes to cost cutting and bottom-line resource management. Now comes ARTFUL MAKING, from professors who work in "opposing fields" (Harvard Business School and the theatre department of Swarthmore College), taking a careful look at accepted business practices side by side the creative processes of artists. The result is a fascinating revaluation of "failure" versus "mistake," where the building blocks of how a play is made are seen against the create-and-trash-create-again steps of most business development. It comes down to accepting more of the improvisatory nature of artistic inspiration, and how the iterative process builds more naturally and comprehensively that mere stage-step planning. This book is a start - but a good one - in bringing the business and art worlds closer together. And for teaching those MBAs a better appreciation of their creative producers. MAC OSX JAGUAR H.O.T. HANDS-ON-TRAINING Garrick Chow 838 pages, $44.99 Lynda.com Books/Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com The latest worthy title from the Lynda Weinman stable of beginner-to-intermediate training books. This is a graphics-heavy introduction and invaluable reference partner to the latest Mac operating system. Text explanations are kept precise and brief, with illustrations doing most of the "talking." A CD-ROM included with the book gives essential tutorials, sample files, and QuickTime movies. CREATE YOUR OWN DVDS Brian Underdahl 377pages, $24.99 Osborne www.osborne.com A splendid PC-oriented guide to all the fundamentals of DVD creation, from capturing video to adding special effects and making useful transitions and chapters stops. Really useful in presenting several options for DVD output formats, including Pinnacle Expression and Sonic DVDit, with rational explanations and justifications for each. The chock-full DVD that accompanies the books includes product samples from CinePlayer, MyDVD, DVDit, RecordNow MAX, Backup MyPC, and ReelDVD. All you need to know. MICROSOFT DIRECT3D PROGRAMMING Clayton Walnum 441 pages, $34.99 SAMS www.samspublishing.com Some of the strongest multimedia graphics are being created with Direct3D, and this is the book for graphics programmers who need to get up to speed on the software quickly. This is a no-nonsense manual that assumes at least a perfunctory C++ knowledge to enable the building of 2D and 3D objects with robust visibility and mobility. Most books I see with a lot of code instruction are densely designed; this one makes it easy on the brain AND the eyes. NEW MEDIA 1740-1915 Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree 271 pages, $34.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu The historical impact of what has is termed "media" is examined in a series of scholarly essays compiled with the goal of giving perspective to social, political, and economic impacts to current and future developments. This is a good primer on the concept that nothing is truly new where human consciousness is concerned. Looking at the impact of devices like the stereoscope, newspaper comic strips, silhouette head portraits (and their influence on politics), and the telephone makes one question whether any technological innovation (like the World Wide Web, email, and wireless computing) can ever truly reorder the thinking and decision processes of the human animal. REALITY MACROMEDIA FLASH COMMUNICATION SERVER MX: Strategic Solutions for Online Interaction William B. Sanders and Ayo Binitie 333 pages, $39.99 Macromedia/Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com www.macromedia.com Sanders and Binitie are true believers: "Flash Communication Server MX is the greatest application for the Internet to come along since Flash." If you're a Web developer with ActionScript experience, then your professional life has not been untouched by the Communication Server MX. Or it will soon be. This is too comprehensive and powerful a tool to be ignored. The novel approach in this book is not a by-the-numbers instruction manual. Rather, the "strategic" in the title is taken to heart with numerous case studies, problems discussed and analyzed, and multiple solution routes described in real-world scenarios based on actual working experiences. There's great insight to the comparative mind-sets of business and technology in using a tool that offers dynamic Web-based audio and video presentations and broadcasting. MICROSOFT WINDOWS SERVER 2003 UNLEASHED Rand Morimoto, Michael Noel, Omar Droubli, Kenton Garinier 1150 pages, $59.99 Sams www.samspublishing.com This is one of those encyclopedic monster technology books that attempts to be all things to all people. The new environment of Windows Server 2003 has so many features and functions substantially updated or added to the base Windows 2000 OS, the authors decided to start from scratch in writing it. They have to introduce concepts of server technology and .NET application development environment, expecting that there is a wide range of administrator sophistication regarding migration and implementation. There's everything from an Active Directory primer here to Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol; that is, a college-level course in nearly all server infrastructure issues. They even help make the business case with section on Best Practices. The table of contents alone is 37 pages long! Even if you are not primarily responsible for an MS server or servers, the introductory material here is invaluable for critical understanding of the technology's relevance in the networked enterprise. HOW TO DO EVERYTHING WITH JAVASCRIPT Scott Duffy 349 pages, $24.99 McGraw-Hill/Osborne www.osborne.com One of the more powerful Web scripting languages gets a simplified approach to learning by a lean, no-nonsense writer. Scott Duffy takes non-programmer Web designers and developers along the JavaScript trail with patient, clear explanations. Chapter two, particularly, lays out an understanding of variables and constants in such a way as to encourage those who fear the abstraction of even simple programming tasks. By mid-point in this book, you'll have enough confidence to begin using JavaScript for very powerful functional development. THE RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS MADE EASY: A Practitioner's Guide To The RUP Per Kroll, Philippe Kruchten 416 pages, $39.99 Addison-Wesley www.rupmadeeasy.com Software geeks are not so different from everybody else. It's just that they're often devoted to systematic development processes that seem arcane, even Byzantine. Rational Software Corporation has developed a "software engineering process framework" based on years of software development through its own and other organizations' projects. Called RUP, the Rational Unified Process is essentially a software-specific project management template that codifies methods of development stages, milestones, and iterations. This is great if you are a software developer, since you can follow the logical phases that Rational has laid out - the primary stages are called Inception, Elaboration, Construction, and Transition - without having to reinvent the process wheel for every project. However, it's also useful for non-developers to get into the mindset of software development. It helps to figure out why things were done the way they were. It also offers management processes that can be used in many different business or project environments. In fact, a version of this book could be reoriented towards business without any reference to software. COLDFUSION MX: Developer's Cookbook Peter Freitag, Brad Leupen, Chris Reeves 386 pages, $39.99 Developer's Library www.developers-library.com The subtitle for this book is, "Expert solutions for ColdFusion developers." Essentially, this means that the tips and techniques described inside are going to be easier and more effectively implemented by active Web application developers rather than those who are starting from scratch and want to understand the basic of ColdFusion MX. Macromedia's Web application server is a powerful tool for building all kinds of cool (cold?) applications, but without some substantial previous programming experience, this book will be relatively unforgiving. Chapter one gets right into String Manipulation - concatenation, encrypting, hashing, you know this stuff, right? That said, if you are a pretty savvy programmer, this will prove an expert resource for using ColdFusion MX at its peak productivity. DIGITAL MEDIA REVISITED: Theoretical And Conceptual Innovations In Digital Domains Edited by Gunnar Liestol, Andrew Morrison, Terje Rasmussen 572 pages, $42.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu The analysis by academia on innovations in new media have potential to guide the theoretical and practical foundations for further strategies of development. It's important to look at what critical thinking has realized about the social and political changes wrought by technology. This collection of scholarly essays looks at areas as diverse as education, design, rhetoric, and ethics to arrive at a loose consensus on how analysis of innovation can itself provide further avenues of exploration. An example of this is in the interesting chapter by Peter Bogh Andersen, "Acting Machines," where ship steering modules and their evolution is shown as an exemplar of user interface issues. It's not that much of a stretch to go from a ship's bridge autopilot to Microsoft Word 98's tool bar. DIGITAL MEDIA REVISITED is a healthy upheaval in expectations about why development takes the shape it does, and how a more conscious attitude can play a significant role affecting the path of that development. |
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