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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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November 2003 ABSOLUTE BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO BUILDING ROBOTS Gareth Branwyn 366 pages, $18.95 Que www.quepublishing.com This surprisingly fun and resourceful book oozes with the enthusiasm of its writer. Gareth Branwyn likes to think he's part robot since he had a hip replacement, but he's actually a disciplined booster of robots as supporters of humanity, rather than liquidators. This is a great read on the background of modern robotics, what they can and can't do, and what is achievable with even a limited technological foundation. Anyone who works with a computer can easily grok the tools that go into robot anatomy, and they can appreciate the functions of robots - even at the level of cute, not-quite-cuddly creatures running along the floor, freaking out the cat, and avoiding bumping into furniture. Three specific projects form the center of the book, including a walking coat hanger, that get your feet wet in construction, and there is an ample set of references that enable those suitably encouraged to seek out more grandiose projects. Nowthat the holidays are upon us, wouldn't it be cooler to make a home-made robot than a fruitcake? ADOBE ACROBAT 6.0 STANDARD - CLASSROOM IN A BOOK Adobe Creative Team 448 pages, $45 Adobe Press www.adobe.com www.peachpit.com The essential tool for document delivery gets the Classroom In A Book treatment. That means a professionally oriented series of short, focused lessons geared to maximizing the functional understanding of the technology. With Acrobat's increasing importance as a medium of cross-platform communication, it's not just a Web designer or graphic artist who uses it. Anyone in business who uses graphs and charts, or Web pages, or Excel forms, or any other software-specific program to express concepts and ideas can use Acrobat to deliver a "form frozen" presentation. The tyranny of style being what it is, Acrobat can ensure the delivery of the original format and design, no matter what the recipient's technical formulation. The Adobe Creative Team are perhaps better charged than anyone to detail the benefits and intricacies of Acrobat, and after finishing this program you'll be impressed at how many different ways you can use your knowledge than simply taking a snapshot of your work. And, you'll be well prepared for passing the Adobe Certification program in Acrobat, if you need that to elevate the status of your services. Includes CD-ROM packed with lesson plans and samples. BLACK ICE: THE INVSIBLE THREAT OF CYBER-TERRORISM Dan Verton 273 pages, $24.99 Osborne www.osborne.com Dan Verton sets up a scary fictionalized scenario of ultimate cyber-terrorism with al-Qaeda jamming the nation's Web-based communications system, confusing police and military responses to violent acts, even messing with hospital records to ensure that emergency patients receive the wrong blood transfusions. Verton is uniformly glum about the potential for wide-ranging devastation through computer networks. "From now on, every day is September 10 in America." Meaning, we are only one day away from disaster and had better shape up now. One can look at the spread of business and government communications through cyberspace as a technological counterpart to economic globalism. Verton doesn't ignore the social and cultural currents that motivate terrorists, but he also doesn't necessarily deal with the fundamental issues of economic inequity, religious intolerance, and lack of education that drive frustration to extreme reactions. Building better firewalls and stronger bulwarks against intrusion and malicious manipulation of our network infrastructure is, of course, a necessary deterrent, but it can also become the fortress that enslaves its builders. There are pictures in BLACK ICE that show examples of hacked sites that represent political statements. I posit that these are not the same as destroying medical records or flying aircraft into buildings. The world is not simply an equation such as good vs. evil. It's complicated. Fortunately, Verton doesn't simplify the complex problem, but he lacks an overall vision for how we can find real solutions without simply spending more money buying more systems and programs. MAC OS X FOR JAVA GEEKS Will Iverson 282 pages, $39.95 O'Reilly www.oreilly.com Books like O'Reilly's new MAC OS X FOR JAVA GEEKS are part of the critical vanguard in fostering basic development projects on the MAC OS X platform. The ease of use and breakthrough capabilities of OS X have not been lost on traditional Mac developers, but its use a tool for cross-platform software development is still an emerging secular movement in a world of parochial religions. Iverson speaks directly to existing Java programmers who may want to simply "check out" OS X, then he dazzles them with the power and flexibility of the platform. Even if you deliver to Windows platform, you'll find OS X the best environment in which unleash your full potential and creativity. WOMEN, ART, & TECHNOLOGY Judy Malloy, editor 571 pages, $39.95 MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu "This book makes clear that women's voices are now integral in new-media art practice," states Judy Malloy at the outset of her impressive compendium, WOMEN, ART, & TECHNOLOGY. Weaving the different strains of multimedia creativity, Malloy brings the voices and artifacts of artists in a wide field, including virtual reality, video, interactivity, graphic design, even music and choreography. Her choices of essays are not specifically geared for feminist ideology but in making a dramatic statement regarding the overwhelming component of female-based creativity in the field of technology-based art. Chapters like The Individual Voice As A Political Voice: Critiquing And Challenging The Media and Trying To Make Narrative Sense Out Of Non-Narrative Work reflect a constant challenging inquisitiveness in exploring technology's capabilities. However, in the equally forceful examination by women artists of technology's cultural, social, and political impact, there is perhaps the deepest appreciation of what a female sensibility brings to the evolution of society. WEBDAV: NEXT-GENERATION COLLABORATIVE WEB AUTHORING Lisa Dusseault 452 pages, $49.99 Prentice Hall www.phptr.com As enterprises grapple with more and more content hosted on Web servers, the logic of good content management becomes obvious. Similarly, as more and more people within a team or company become involved with publishing in the Web environment, tools for effective collaboration become necessary. Web authoring has become a component of Web publishing, and has expanded beyond the sole administration of by a Webmaster, developer, or designer. WebDAV (Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning) is the IETF standard for Web site authoring and wide-area collaboration. In other words, WebDAV is both a tool and process the Web can be more effectively managed for multi-user content creation and publishing. It streamlines the method of document sharing and version control, and at its end-development state can lead to greater ease-of-use for a wider range of contributors. Webmasters won't be the only ones to find this book useful; IT managers and software developers can breeze through it to realize how WebDAV can solve a host of problems associated with decentralized sites, multiple authors, and archived storage retrieval. UPGRADING AND REPAIRING NETWORKS, 4th Edition Terry William Ogletree 1224 pages, $59.99 Que www.quepublishing.com Briefly, this is a massive, encyclopedic approach to networks and their maintenance and upgrade. It's a technician's bible, with detailed problem-solving the key ingredient to its 1224 pages. I could mention some of the subjects contained therein, but if you work on networks at all you've probably got your own list of critical issues that would make any of my random selection of examples from its vast Table of Contents seem irrelevant. QUARKXPRESS 6 KILLER TIPS Eda Warren 239 pages, $29.99 New Riders www.newriders.com QUARKXPRESS 6 FOR WINDOWS AND MACINTOSH Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas 541 pages, $24.99 Peachpit Press www.peachpit.com The industry-standard page layout application now is as flexible for Web design as it always has been for print publishing. The introduction of layout processes for both print and the Web has made QuarkXPress doubly powerful, while at the same time simplifying the basic manageability of arranging text and graphics. Is there anything you CAN'T do with QuarkXPress? The latest Peachpit Visual Quickstart Guide gives as much a detailed survey of Quark's capabilities as any other. Their usual workshop formatting allows both neophytes and experts to come up to speed for their respective needs-how to use the damn thing, and how to take advantage of all the new functions and tools. Eda Warren, on the other hand, presumes some facility with QuarkXPress already, and has joined the Killer Tips crowd with a valuable compendium of "cool tips and hidden secrets" that will make regular users of the software croon with delight. Her suggestions range from the simple to the complex, but they shine at non-instinctual things that are like a light bulb going off. For example, she says you should pause for a second while rotating an object so that Quark can get the "chance to collect the image in RAM so that when you rotate, you see the image, graphic, or text that's inside, not just the box." Or, how you can indent with a dialog box by using the Indent Here character, and bypass the Formats dialog and Tab ruler. See? Handy stuff. GENDER INCLUSIVE GAME DESIGN: EXPANDING THE MARKET Sheri Graner Ray 193 pages, $39.95 Charles River Media www.charlesriver.com The marketing of electronic games to girls and women has had an inconsistent history within the game industry. The dominance of testosterone-fed battles and shoot-'em-ups has remained strong while efforts to create games appealing to girls, along the line of Barbie, Michelle Kwan, Nancy Drew, and Cosmo Makeovers, go through boom and bust cycles. Though the booms are never has high as they are for, say, "Grand Theft Auto" or "Tomb Raider." Sheri Graner Ray takes a deep thoughtful look at the potential of the marketplace and analyzes consumer patterns, manufacturer motivations, and game design fundamentals to offer what is essentially a manifesto for revitalizing the industry. Girls want to have fun, and by approaching game design and marketing with a better understanding of the target audience usability requirements, social interactive requirements, and cross-gender mutualities, the game industry can renovate, and expand, itself to serve the widest possible consumer market. PC ANNOYANCES Steve Bass 176 pages, $19.95 O'Reilly www.oreilly.com This is one of the most fun and readable books on solving the little annoyances that make using a PC more frustrating experience than it should be. A PC is not a Mac, of course, so there are fundamental problems a great book like this can't solve for you. But Steve Bass has nailed so many headaches that he deserves to be sponsored by Anacin. You'll find everything here from making fonts clearer to fixing up toolbars in email programs to getting faster access to the control panel. Tons of stuff; this is a fine book for browsing. And, the new reader-friendly design muscle from O'Reilly makes it an even more pleasant experience than usual for their reliable, expert publications. DUNGEONS AND DREAMERS: FROM GEEK TO CHIC Brad King and John Borland 273 pages, $24.99 Osborne www.osborne.com From the early '70s ascendancy of Dungeons & Dragons to the intersection with the interactive generation, DUNGEONS AND DREAMERS serves as a biographical history of modern electronic gaming. The ambitious fantasy creation of Gary Gygax, Dungeons & Dragons, stimulated the imagination of programmers who brought out the first versions of Doom and Ultima Online. They tapped into a vast social need to connect at the psychologically ripe level of role-playing. From there, electronic and online gaming took off through its Byzantine paths of competition, aggression, cartoons, realism, violence, nation-building, speed, and deliberate, analytical solution searching. King and Borland present vivid portraits of the pioneers and players in the evolution to today's vast marketplace. There are surprises along the way, road blocks, little guy vs. megacorporation scenarios, and compromised ideals. And lots of money. Lots. But there are still the guys with imagination working out their dreams on a computer screen. Here's the background on the magic making. SAMS TEACH YOURSELF MAC OS X DIGITAL MEDIA Robyn Ness 763 pages, $29.99 SAMS www.samspublising.com If you're setting yourself up to be the Complete Multimedian, then this is the SAMS for you. It's a compendium of all latest tools that the Mac OS X is capable of supporting: Digital cameras, Photoshop Elements, burning CDs and DVDs, MP4s and digital music, even digital video. Covering all the subject matter, even in 763 pages, is a challenge, and Robyn Ness wisely limits herself to an introductory approach that brightly defines the capabilities succinctly and with a minimum of background and theory. This is a user's guide, with a strong "get up and go" attitude for new users. You'll be able to make quite serviceable DVDs, for example, with chapter stops, a title card, and a professional performance. But, you may want further training for elaborate sound coding, for example, or finessing all the necessary editing techniques that will allow you to enter the marketplace. For the home user, though, everything you'll need to know about all the Apple "i" tools are here. HOW COMPUTERS WORK, 7th Edition Ron White 404 pages, $29.99 Que www.quepublishing.com The sumptuous, lavish 10th anniversary edition of the popular HOW COMPUTERS WORK includes even more color and exploding graphics laying out the basic PC functionality of everything from how software gets written to how a computer actually computes - even simple addition is not so simple. There is new coverage of the Pentium 4, Internet security, firewalls, memory upgrades, digital cameras. In fact, so much keeps being added all the time to the rainbow symphony of computer technology that Ron White is guaranteed a job for life. And beyond! |
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