Book Reviews

I have got to say, I am quite impressed with The Manga Guide to Calculus. As the title suggests, it is an introduction into the ideas of differential and integral calculus through the use of manga and a story line. The book fulfills on this goal and then some.

The Manga Guide to Calculus starts off with a brief introduction and review of functions. It then jumps right into derivatives, what they mean, and how to compute them. Integration is then considered along Taylor series and partial differentiation. Throughout the story, the guide frequently references real world applications in economics, physics, and chemistry, and explains problems in these fields through the use of calculus. The author also includes probability, statistics, and trigonometry sections with calculus explanations. Exercises exist at the end of each section for you to complete and solutions are presented at end of the book.

There are a few downsides to the manga style of presentation. Formal proofs and definitions do not lend themselves well to be included, and the book is certainly lacking in this area. There may also be some areas which the reader will have to go over a few times to fully understand and see how the book goes from one idea to the next because of the amount of information being presented.

I would recommend this book to those who want a brief review of calculus, beginners who want context as to its uses, and to those who enjoy reading a good math book. This book is not for those who need a thorough review since many important topics are skipped such as limits, related rates, and volumes of rotations. Overall, Hiroyuki Kojima and Shin Togami did an excellent job in writing and illustrating the book respectively, which makes The Manga Guide to Calculus a very different and attractive learning tool.

Hacking Vim by Kim Schulz, a book truly suited for the average Vim user looking to find his or her way into the advanced and wonderful world of Vim. From basic customization to fully advanced scripting, this book has it all.

To begin the book shows you what I consider to be the most important part of Vim, making it pretty! Of course in the process it also outlines a number of useful tips in order to increase usability and productivity. The book also devotes what seems like a small chapter on GVim, Vim's GUI counterpart, and some of the more advanced menu options it has available. Although this chapter didn't appeal to me directly it wasn't so intrusive that it actually got in the way, just skip a few pages and we're back to hacking the core of Vim again.

The book continues by showing you a better way to navigate Vim, faster searching, multiple files. It introduces you to the tabbing features of Vim and how to use them effectively. From this point the book takes a bit of a turn and begins to focus more so on using Vim while in a programming environment, specifically C/C++. Many of the tips given could be easily applied to other languages, Perl, Ruby, etc., however specific examples do not exist which at times can make some of the concepts being taught a little tricker to follow.

The final chapter of the book goes into the Vim scripting language and the power and versatility it has. In fact the final chapter could be expanded into a new book and still only begin to scratch the surface. Luckily, just like Hacking Vim itself the scripting chapter starts off by showing you how to set up your scripting environment effectively and then moves you through the syntax of the language. The book finishes on a high note by showing a handful of "useless" yet important Vim scripted games that show the full capabilities of the Vim scripting language.

All in all this book showed me the parts of Vim that I had only previously heard about but never understood. This book has showed me a number of improvements for my own .vimrc as well as how to use Vim effectively when handling any task. In fact this very review was written in Vim, something I never would have done before reading this book, spell checking and all.

Do you enjoy puzzles? Do you enjoy debugging other people's code? If so, you'll enjoy this book.

If reference materials or traditional educational coding books were like newspapers, then this book would be the crossword puzzle page. Just like any crossword puzzle, some sections are harder than others, and the puzzles in this book are no exception. If you can't quite figure out the subtle differences between pointers, addresses, double pointers, etc, then this listing of the plethora of ways that you can get yourself into trouble while programming in C++ will likely prove too difficult to solve at parts. Without a doubt though, anyone who fully knows C++ (and C, which is also covered in this book) and all its intricacies will not find most of the puzzles exceptionally difficult.

That being said, the book still proves a good read for anyone of higher programming skill; any reader will be scratching his or her head to find the truly subtle ways that the all too simple-looking sample programs have been broken. Luckily, there are helpful, very optional hints and answers in the back of the book one can read in order to get thinking on the right track without spoiling the fun too much. Additionally, throughout the book's puzzles, there are amusing programmer-related debugging horror stories and funny programming quips that provide a brief smile, even when one is wracking one's brains out to find the misplaced comma, subtly misspelled keyword, missing semicolon, or devious memory misallocation that is keeping the answer of the problem elusive.

As the title says, it is a beginner's book to the topic, though I am unaware of any other books that deal with Pygame as much as this one, beginner or otherwise. The book deals more with the language and libraries themselves instead of "game development" per se. By that I mean there is no chapter on developing ideas or group structures in a company, etc. As a guide to picking up Pygame, though, this book was great. Each chapter uses it's own examples, but I feel that that helps to better cover the topics being discussed, versus a book that creates a game from the ground up throughout the entire book, where the example code may feel unrelated or contrived. As other reviewers have noted, the book focuses more on the example than on the theory, often showing working code and explaining each piece.

The book starts out with an short introduction to Python. The author assumes a general programming background. The tutorials are lacking if you've never used Python before, but some side-reading should give you enough information about the language to continue with the rest of the book. To those who already know Python, the first two chapters serve as a good refresher. The 2D section was great. Everything was in there you'd need to begin coding your own small games. There's an interesting section on AI. The section on 3D design I found myself skipping over, mainly because that wasn't what I was looking to use for my own project. Glancing through it, though, it seemed like a good place to get your feet wet with PyOpenGL (the 3D rendering engine).

There were only a few problems I noted: Occasionally the sample code provided on the website did not function properly, and needed a bit of fiddling with. The code in the book worked fine, however. Events could have been covered at greater length, as they are extremely important in game design. Also, something that I found great but others might scoff at was the author's use of his own gameobjects library. It allowed you to skip the mathematics and just use the functions and get through, but without really knowing how the functions work. Personally I think that's a great approach, because there's no real-world situation in a large game project where you're going to know how all the code works everywhere in the program.

Deploying OpenLDAP by Tom Jackiewicz is good for the administrator or developer who is looking at diving into LDAP. The author splits the book into two nice segments. Part one of the book talks about how LDAP came about, setup, and database design. Part two talks about service integration, the tools included with LDAP and scripting with LDAP.

The first part of this book is good at explaining how LDAP works, and what to consider when designing your LDAP database. There is also a section that helps the reader decide on the distribution of LDAP they want, and how to build the environment from scratch. This part finishes up with the configuration needed to boot the LDAP server.

Part two picks up where part one left off. It starts off with integrating LDAP into the services currently running on your network. The book provides some sample scripts to work with, such as a set of scripts to sync NIS and LDAP. This section also includes ways of integrating LDAP with client services like Outlook and SAMBA while also providing programming API examples for those who want to create their own LDAP applications.

Overall the book was a good read and I would recommend it to anyone who is just starting to work with LDAP, or wants to know more about the system that they are administrating. The provided configuration files for the LDAP install are a little out of date, but they still provide good information. The commands are still current and Jackiewicz does an excellent job of explaining all the different areas of OpenLDAP.