This book describes the technologies involved in all aspects of a large networking system and how the various devices can interact and communicate with each other. Using a bottom up approach the authors demonstrate how it is feasible, for instance, for a cellular device user to communicate, via the all-purpose TCP/IP protocols, with a wireless notebook computer user, traversing all the way through a base station in a cellular wireless network (e.g., GSM, CDMA), a public switched network (PSTN), the Internet, an intranet, a local area network (LAN), and a wireless LAN access point. The information bits, in travelling through this long path, are processed by numerous disparate communication technologies. The authors also describe the technologies involved in infrastructure less wireless networks.

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Photoshop CS3 for Screen Printers details the features of Photoshop CS3 and is geared toward print facilities, mainly screen printers and similar types of graphic artists. Features important to these industries include creating a personalized interface, acquiring images from clients’ disks, acquiring images by scanning existing artwork, importing and exporting images, and creating new images. Color separations also play a big role in these industries, as does printing on specialty films and papers. The Photoshop interface is also discussed, including the toolbox, the palettes, the menu and options bars, and the Adobe Bridge. Additionally, the finer points of printing are detailed, including adding and using crop marks, registration marks, and captions, and producing four-color separations.

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LightWave v9 Texturing takes you behind the fine art of texturing and surfacing interesting and detailed textures for your 3D objects using LightWave 3D. Texturing and prepping your objects for texturing is a task that many artists find intimidating and/or confusing. LightWave v9 Texturing breaks down this process and makes it easier to understand by guiding you through LightWave's powerful surfacing toolset, tutorials, and exercises. LightWave v9 now offers a nodal shading system, which is the standard tool in the visual effects industry for the creation of surfaces. This book will show you how easy, yet extremely powerful and flexible this new system is, allowing you to dive in and create great surfaces immediately.

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I'm a fan of Java-based frameworks (such as Echo 2) and was looking forward to this book on ZK as a nice introduction to the framework.

The book is slim but delivers on exactly the kind of content I was hoping for. It starts with a great overview, and then has a few real world examples.

I would have loved to see more information on working in pure Java (richlets), but otherwise found the content to be great for the size.

The only oddity is that my copy appears to have been printed off a screen-resolution PDF - all of the text, images, etc. look worse than if I ran it off on my home laser printer. I'm going to chalk this up to an oddity of how this particular edition was run off, but I would hope that this is a rare QC issue that would be quickly fixed.

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As a Flex developer, you'll no doubt come across repetitive problems every day in your workwouldn't it be nice to have a library of solutions to turn to, to solve these problems quickly and easily? Well, this book provides just that, with over 100 solutions to common problems in one easy volume. In Flex 2 Solutions, renowned Flash and Flex expert Marco Casario assumes you know the basics, and dives straight into practical code examples that you could build up yourselves via step by step tutorials, and plug straight in to your own code, saving you hours of development time. Areas explored include Flex 2 components, charting, working with remote data, data validation, displaying data with list based controls, controlling the look and feel of your applications, application security, working with dynamic data sources (such as ColdFusion, PHP, and Java backends,) and much more. In each solution, Marco takes you through the workings of the example step by step, and then presents some expert's tips, which will take your understanding further, and give you unique insights into Flex development.

• Over 100 Solutions to common problems included
• Plug the code example straight into your own applications, saving hours of development time
• Covers the full spectrum of Flex 2 topics, from styling your applications, to security, and interfacing with databases.

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Want to take Ruby to the limit? Looking for new, powerful, and creative ideas that will take Ruby beyond Rails and web programming? If you’re comfortable with Ruby, you’ll be itching to go further–apply Practical Ruby Projects: Fresh Ideas with Ruby and become a master of advanced Ruby techniques.

Rubyist Topher Cyll brings several imaginative projects to this book, ranging from making generative music, animations, and turn-based games to implementing simulations, algorithms, and even an implementation of Lisp!

Art, music, theory, and games–this book has it all. Best of all, it’s all done with Ruby.

Each chapter, in addition to making you say “Cool–I hadn’t thought of that before,” looks at solving tricky development problems, enforces best practices, and encourages creative thinking. You’ll be building your own exciting, imaginative Ruby Projects in no time.

• Create imaginative and innovative Ruby programming projects.
• Learn how to solve tricky development problems, be guided by best practices, and be inspired to think creatively.
• Don’t waste time on the basics–it’s assumed you know the fundamentals of Ruby already.

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This book is for any Flex developer who has mastered the basics, but wants to take their skills to the top levelit is packed with essential practical techniques in use in a professional production environment, which you can learn from and use in your own Flex 2 or Flex 3 applications. Written by a team of expert developers from the Los Angeles-based Almer/Blank consultancy, the book takes you through exactly how they built the popular Rich Media X (RMX) application for Adobe user groups, step by step. Assuming the basics, they take you through planning the project, wireframing and application design, putting the basic structure together (including the PHP and MySQL backend,) customizing the look and feel of the application (to make it not just look like any other Flex application,) and implementing all the killer features that make the RMX great, such as blog, wiki, content aggregation from RSS and other sources, video, audio visualizer, events calendar, and advertising mechanisms.

• Learn how Rich Media X was built!
• A real-world Flex book, written by experts using the technology in their day-to-day work
• Contains all the killer features you need to build up your own web 2.0 Flex applicationblog, wiki, video, content aggregation, events calendar, and much more.

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If you want to create exciting dynamic web sites that will amaze your online audience, then the Flash platform is a great way to go, with it's many features, including powerful graphical and sound and video capabilities. To really harness the power of Flash though, you need to make use of ActionScript, Flash's coding language, to provide dynamic effects, enable user interaction, and manipulate data. Adobe just made things even more powerful with ActionScript 3.0. They've taken ActionScript and expanded it into a fully-fledged programming language, with full object-oriented capabilities, improved events, sounds and video support, and drawing capabilities, support for regular expressions, and much, much more. Whether you are an aspiring ActionScript developer, or an experienced ActionScript developer who wants to upgrade your knowledge to version 3.0, this book teaches all you need to know to start to harness the power of ActionScript 3.0 using Flash CS3, Flex 2 or Flex 3. It covers all the essential techniques from the ground up, allowing you to get up and running quickly and easily. The sensible layout of the book makes it easy to refer back to techniques when you need to, and there are even reference sections at the back of the book to allow you to look up syntax quickly. With this book as your guide, you'll be creating killer ActionScript powered Flash applications before you know it! (more…)

Whether you are an experienced Flash designer or developer looking for a guide to doing animation in Flash, or a novice to Flash who is looking for an effective way to create and distribute animations, this book will prove invaluable to you. Covering every aspect of Flash animation, the book is a fast-paced yet thorough review of the Flash animation process. Written by the Emmy-Award winning team at ANIMAX, this book not only reveals the step-by-step process followed by one of today's leading Flash animation studios, it gives you valuable tips and tricks to take your Flash animation to the next level. Divided into three phases of production (pre-production, animation, post-production) this book breaks the Flash animation process into smaller, more manageable steps. And because the authors approach the animation process from various perspectives (such as producer, animator, and editor) the book balances many of the real-world issues facing today's Flash animators, from artistic to technical to financial. The book starts off by looking at planning and designing an animation project, including working out your goals, and putting together character libraries and storyboards. Next up we look at the production phase, which includes using plug-ins to make your work more efficient, implementing your animation, and adding special effects. Finally, we look at post-production work, including how After Effects can be used effectively alongside Flash for tasks such as camera mechanics, how to make Flash not look like Flash, and tips and tricks from the experts. Whatever the reason, like millions of others around the world you've become interested in Flash animation. And you've come to the right place to learn more. This book is compatible with pretty much any fairly recent version of Flash. (more…)