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Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Windows Forms Programming in C# Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional Authors: Chris Sells Rating: 5/5  Chris Sells has used his knowledge and writing talents to provide a clear picture of the WinForm world, browsing each notion in the right order and explaining one complicated notion at a time when needed. After digesting the WinForms basis in the chapters 2 and 3, you'll understand how the pieces are working all together, from the Application class to the WndProc method, last frontier with the old Win32 world without forgetting features not often detailed such as the HTML help system or the MDI layout. The Chapters 4 to 6 are dedicated to GDI+ and give you a complete reference of color, brush, pen, shape, path, images, font and text. You'll see the basic stuff but also how to handle transparency, animation and optimized drawing, advanced string formatting and Transforms. If you have to send your rendering code to a printer, chapter 7 is for you: you'll learn how to use the common dialogs and how to put your code in the right place during the printing workflow. Maybe a complete document printing example would have been better for code reuse than the different smaller examples. From here, the chapters dig deeper in complicated notions and this is where its value shines. With the chapters 8, 9 and 10, you'll see how to use the existing controls and how to build your own controls that smoothly integrate the Visual Studio IDE and enhance code reuse. The localisation and resource usage in the managed world are clearly described and you won't loose hours trying to access resources in your code anymore! The chapter 11 focuses on your program execution through the Application, Registry/RegistryKey and Environment classes. The section related to the application settings and Isolated Storage itself is worth the price of the book! The mecanisms behind data access, dataset and data binding are detailed in Chapter 12 and 13. If you want to check that this book is really for you, look for Chris Sells articles on MSDN and MSDN Magazine web sites. The last two chapters about Web based deployment and multi-threaded GUI treat how to solve the same kind of problems. As you'll see, the rest of the book offers the same level of quality, with details and solutions you'll find nowhere else. I have a tiny regret: I would have expected more "under the cover" journeys based on decompiled views of .NET assemblies for an even better understanding of the relationship between classes of the Framework. I'll have to keep on playing with Anakrino and Reflector, waiting for your next "Inside/Undocumented WinForms" book Chris :^)
Product: Book - Hardcover
Title: The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security Publisher: Wiley Authors: Kevin D. Mitnick, William L. Simon, Steve Wozniak Rating: 3/5  Since my first book on hackers (Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll) and reading about Mitnick in the early 90s, I was expecting a fantastic book outlining how he managed to do so much while on the run. Unortunately, the writing style is quite repetitive and boring. Don't get me wrong - the substance is there, and there is plenty to be learned from Mitnick's 'fictional stories' that illustrate the concept of social engineering. However, as I said, the style leaves a lot to be desired, and after reading the firsy half of the book, I struggled motivating myself to grab the book and finish reading it. I recommend it only if you do not understand how social engineering works and don't mind putting up with a professional social engineering with amateur writing skills.
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence Publisher: Addison Wesley Authors: Ivan Bratko Rating: 5/5 Professor Bratko has done a tremendous job of putting all the fundamental concepts of Prolog and its applications in various areas of AI. Although this book is focused on Prolog, the concepts that he has discussed are so fundamental that they can be implemented in other languages like Java as well. I recommend this book to everyone who wants to learn Prolog. I would also recommend the readers to use a Prolog system to work out the examples and exercises as s/he goes through every chapter. A DEC10 Prolog system (like SICStus Prolog) would probably be the best companion for this book.
Product: Book - Paperback
Title: Alison Balter's Mastering Microsoft Access 2000 Development Publisher: Sams Authors: Alison Balter Rating: 5/5 When I look at my library of manuals, stretching from end to end of several book shelves, I realize how few of them I go back to consistantly. This one is a well dog-eared reference manual, good for the developer who wants to get to the essence of a technique without trying to decipher poorly written phrasing or struggling with an index that is not complete. I hope Alison will be writing the Access 2002 version of this book.
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