Danaher, computer artist, writer, and educator, creates an excellent introduction to the principles and terminology of 3D computer illustration. With 500 full-color illustrations and clearly written text, it is the best primer for understanding how artists and designers use 3D computer software to create animations, illustrations, and models. The format, index, and glossary also make it useful as a resource. Danaher includes a brief history of how artists represented the 3D world in 2D illustrations, followed by a survey of today's most popular software for animation and rendering. Secondly, he explains core concepts such as nurbs, Bezier splines, ray tracing, and radiosity, to name a few. Each concept is explained in a two-page spread including simple computer illustrations. Although this is not a software spec how-to book, Danaher offers "simple lessons" such as modeling parametrics, Booleans, and animation and texture mapping. He also introduces Web 3D including topics such as VRML, Cult 3D, and Hypercosm. Finally, he showcases a portfolio of computer renderings, including three illustrations by the author that are breathtaking. An appealing book for anyone who wants to gain a basic understanding of the concepts of 3D computer visualization. General readers; lower- and upper-division undergraduates; graduate students; professionals; two-year technical program students.

A lush, beautiful introduction to the world of 3D. Perfect for newbies and those just wondering what 3D is all about. Plus it includes a Cinema 4D tutorial (building a photo-realistic pool cue).

This book left me wanting more from this publisher and this author.

The BEST book out there for beginning 3D artists. Period. Should be included with all 3D software packages. If you're thinking about getting into 3D design, buy this first!!!!!!

This is my son's favorite, and mine too! Although he's only six months old, I've been reading to him almost every day since he was old enough to pay attention, and he has loved this book from the word go - probably because of the bright colors and simple shapes, but maybe also because when I read it to him it's fun to make "dinosaur noises" and roars, which he finds very entertaining. Although I have read this book so often that I have literally memorized it, I'm not tired of it yet, and that's about as high a recommendation for a baby book as I can make!

This book is a must have for reading time. My one year old boy has loved it since birth (well almost birth)! He really likes the part about "Long sharp claws and long sharp teeth! " It brings the house down. Yet, it still ends with a sleepy touch.

Get it... or regret it!

It is a good book and I enjoyed the book a lot and I liked the pictures. This book can tell you about dinosaurs and what their different body parts are called. Some of them ate meat and some of them ate plants. The dinosaurs lived a long time ago.

Moses Wine, that wistful, ironic and always thoughtful P.I. has been with us through eight books and some thirty years, rambling from his beginnings in Berkeley to the capitals of the world. We've been along with him through marriage and family, divorce and acrimony, to what he hopes will be his final wife. Has Moses done everything? Well, not quite because now, in this new book, Moses Wine wants to direct.
In "Director's Cut," Roger L. Simon has rediscovered his satiric impulse. In "The Big Fix," the first in the series, Simon had fun with the Los Angeles-Chandler style. ("I turned left on La Cienega and drove right on Santa Monica...") This time around, Moses gets mixed up with the twin scourges of the present age: movie making and terrorism. He's game, if not quite ready, on both counts.
Book for book, I've always been caught up in the various capers and scrapes, and that, appropriately, is the case here. But this time, I saw something else. Moses Wine has become part of the American cultural landscape. Simon has created an American archetype, a fictional detective who has entered our collective mind and now stands for more than his adventures. Like Lew Archer or Sam Spade, Moses Wine -- who is just trying to get through the day -- finds people are shooting at him. Just like the country he reflects. What Simon has done to keep this series fresh is to let Moses grow and change. That's unusual for literary detectives who are usually frozen along one mean street or another. The joke is that as Moses ages, it seems that he's only going to make new mistakes, and he does, but then damned if he doesn't also manage to achieve a certain wisdom.
In "Director's Cut" he's in Prague with a pregnant wife, chasing down a completion bond problem (it's a kind of insurance)on a movie set. Moses winds up in the director's chair. He's not bad at it, at least he's no worse than the people who direct movies all the time, and after all Moses Wine can also collar miscreants, crack cases and crack wise.

Immediately following September 11th, Moses Wine's detective agency became seriously strapped for clients. They only had one case and his partner (who is also his wife) was handling it. Moses was puzzled when he was called into the local FBI office and questioned about the destruction of the Twin Towers, the Czech Republic and Radio Free Europe headquarters in Prague. Of course he knows nothing about the subjects the FBI asked him about but matters become a little clearer when he receives a call from a friend who is in Prague.

Arthur Sugarman, a completion bondsman for movies, wants him to come over there and act as private security for a film being shot in Prague. Almost as soon as he arrives, Islamic fundamentalists kidnap Moses and the film's leading lady. When government officials rescue them, the kidnap leader escapes. Moses becomes the film director because his predecessor was badly injured during the abduction. Moses works with CIA officials to try to stop a terrorist cell who infiltrated the movie set from carrying out their diabolic agenda.

DIRECTOR'S CUT is a wild and wacky thriller that satirizes the games one has to play to make it in the motion picture industry. It is also a somber reflection about the effect September 11th has had on the protagonist and how he needs to contribute to the cause. The mystery revolves around the leader who is manipulating events to further his personal agenda and how the hero finally figures it out and tries to stop him. Robert L. Simon is a talented writer who can always be counted to deliver a chilling thriller.

Harriet Klausner

Saw the Glenn Reynolds' review on MSNBC.com and snapped the book up. This is a true insiders look at the madness of indie filmmaking with good scene in PRague as well. I read one of Simon's earlier books set in Japana and liked that too.

Must add my praise for this book. Gorgeous colors in clear graphic designs plus various colorways so you can see what would happen if you use different colors. I get a feeling of generosity from the authors who obviusly love their craft and want to share it.

In addition to bold and unusual patterns, Mary Norden has an extremely good eye for colors. I use patterns and parts of patterns from this book all the time.

This book brings the beauty of the various international fabrics to your needlepoint canvas. It's not your grandmother's needlepoint - no cats or flowers, just bold and exciting designs with great color graphs and ideas. I highly recommend this book - I even ordered a copy for my sister although it was out-of-print.

Never thought I would use the words "Romance" "Suspense" "Thriller" and the History of Mathematics in the same sentence. Great book and worth reading. It is a gripping account of the events leading to the solving of one of the greatest puzzles in Mathematics.

-
"Mathematical theorems rely on a logical process and once proven are true until the end of time," says Simon Singh, on page 21 of this impressive exposition of scientific method and the history of mathematics.

The author points out, under the rubric "Absolute Proof," that there is a difference between the "hard science" of mathematics and the guesswork, maybe, and make-believe of the "pseudo-sciences" (sociology, anthropology, linguistics, psychology and others). Singh goes on to say that the proofs acceptable in these pseudo-sciences "rely on observation and perception, both of which are fallible and provide only approximations to the truth."

Simon Singh has a Ph.D. in particle physics from Cambridge University. He worked for the BBC where he co-produced and directed their documentary film Fermat's Last Theorem, which is at the heart of the PBS/BBC/NOVA production The Proof, outlining Princeton professor Andrew Wiles' solution to Fermat's 400 year old problem. (I tried to purchase Fermat's Last Theorem directly from the BBC, when I could not get it from Amazon.com, but BBC prices are too steep for a poor "Yank")

Fermat's Enigma is the story of Frenchman, Pierre de Fermat, who happens to be one of the greatest mathematicians of all time. It is the story of the world's 400-year-long effort to solve a problem he discussed, later to become the "Holy Grail of Mathematics." The dust jacket says it is a "human drama of high dreams, intellectual brilliance, and extraordinary determination, it will bring the history and culture of mathematics into exciting focus for all who read it."

Every innocent school child, with an IQ greater that his shoe-size, is familiar with the Pythagorean theorem, which states that, in a right-triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. The mystery of Fermat's last theorem is directly rooted in Pythagoras and ancient Greece.

Here's the problem under consideration by Fermat: x(to the power "n") + y(to the power "n") = z(to the power "n") where "n" is any number greater than 2. Can it be proved?

The equation represents an infinite series of equations each with a different value for "n". An infinite number of equations can never be solved, therefore it has always been impossible to prove that the underlying equation has no solution; i.e. there is no value for "n" which would make the equation balance.

This is exactly what the genius Frenchman, Pierre de Fermat, claimed to have done, almost 400 years ago, when he noted in the margins of Diophantus' Arithmetica: "I have discovered a truly marvelous proof which this margin is too narrow to contain." Thus was created a mystery and a problem not solved until Andrew Wiles came along.

"Wiles proof of the Last Theorem is not the same as Fermat's," Singh says on page 283. Fermat noted in the margin of his Arithmetica that his proof could not fit in the space available. "Wiles 100 pages of dense mathematics certainly fulfills this criteria," Singh continues, "but, surely the Frenchman did not invent modular forms, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, Galois groups and the Kolyvagin-Flach method centuries before anyone else.

So, if Fermat did not use Wiles' method and the tools available to Wiles, what did the Frenchman use? What was Fermat's actual proof and how did he arrive at his result? Wiles arrived at his own proof, his own way, and officially, Wiles has solved Fermat's Last Theorem.

While it appears that nobody knows for sure, exactly what Fermat did, or how he did it, I believe that [one person] knows, but remains incommunicado, like Lawrence of Arabia and Gordon of Khartoum. Fermat's mystery will have to wait just a little longer.

A beautifully written book that traces the development of classical number theory in a way that its "humaness", if you will, makes clear that even the most abstract of thinkers in this most abstract of all human endeavors, is very human, indeed. Particularly to my liking is the author's covering of the important women in mathematics, especially his excellent coverage of the contributions of French mathematician, Sophie Germain. That she had to work and publish under an assumed masculine name says a lot about the way we were; perhaps the way we still are in some instances. But finally revealing her identity to the great Guass, and receiving his praise for her work is simply delightful to read.

I cannot recommend this work too highly. A masterly performance that will reward the reader with at least a small appreciation of the power, the beauty of the human mind.

Starting with a strike of the coal miners, the company hires outside thugs, who end up massacring the miners. But this is only the beginning of the blood that made Williamson (a small coal mining town in southern Illinois in the 1920's) Bloody!

The thugs didn't leave. They rather liked having the run of the town. Bootlegging, gang wars, and all [heck] breaks loose.

Its important to remember the context when reading this book--because the author doesn't give you much. The worst race riots in American History happened a few miles away, in East St. Louis, in 1916--a few short years before the time covered in this book. Unions hadn't been legally recognized--that came a few years later, amidst the depression. Coal, and the economy in general, were booming. The stock market was exploding. And the federal government took the position that its role was to foster the wealth of the rich.

Anyone who thinks that political corruption is confined to big cities, hasn't spent much time in small town politics. This book is an eye opener. Of course, anyone who thinks that this sort of corruption is a part of America's long distant past, hasn't been reading the paper much recently. Political shenanigans in down state Illinois are alive and well. Of course, the big economic engine driving the southern Illinois economy today is the prison industry, but that's another book. (see Going Up the River, by Joseph Hallinan, for a description of the same area today, dominated by Tamms Supermax Prison).

Williamsburg County had an unbelievable amount of violence, in both variety and magnitude, in such a short period of time. In less than fifty years this one county had labor wars, Ku Klux Klan wars, gang wars, and one of the worst feuds in American history. Paul Angle is a good writer, but that is only an added benefit. Reading the media accounts of these events would be fascinating enough. Anyone interested in a case study of a dysfunctional community should read this book.

I write primarily to prevent the interested reader from being influenced by Alan Mills's review. It seems that Alan's review is based on a look at the dustjacket, or perhaps something someone told him while he wasn't exactly paying attention. Had he been listening more closely, he might have learned that Williamson is not a town, but a county. Had he finished Chapter One he might not have missed the central fact that it was not the miners who were killed in what came to be known as the "Herrin Massacre", but the company's mine guards and a group of recent Irish immigrants working the mine during the strike,who surrendered to the union under promise of safe conduct, before being taken to a field and shot by striking miners, who then cut the throats of their victims and urinated on their bodies. It is possible that a reading of the book would have alerted Alan to the fact that in 1922 Williamson County the union was not only well established, but had the support of a majority of the populace, and the collusion of some county officials. It was a combination of public intimidation and bribery that prevented jurors from convicting anyone in the two celebrated murder trials that followed the massacre. I don't understand Alan's point about the federal government fostering the wealth of the rich; worrying about this may be a hobby of Alan's, but the concept has nothing to do with Angle's book, or the events it describes. Those who do go on to read Angle's classic book will find a well-written and exciting account of an extraordinary period of lawlessness in Southern Illinois. It is also well-researched and accurate. Some of the participants in these events later refused to write books of their own, saying that they could never tell the story as well as Paul Angle already had.

Reading this book gave me my start in my self study of cryptography, its science and its history. While I will not pretend to be anywhere near an expert on the subject, I found this book very insightful. It is an easy read, and not tedious in any way. It is meant as a "science for non-scientists" type book, and more of a history than anything else. (I have only managed to solve the first two cryptologic challenges at the end of this book, but am diligently working on the rest in my spare time.)

The Code Book is a delightful treatment of the subject of cryptography. It is a nice combination of history, science, warfare and politics.

The author uses interesting historical events as background to narrate the different phases of what might be called the mainstream developments of cryptography and cryptanalysis. It is a captivating presentation.

The book started off with the story of Queen Mary of Scotland, and went on to cover the Caesar cipher, Vigenère cipher, the famous Enigma, the super-secret Colossus, and the modern day computer based encryption and decryption developments. The author also threw in a couple of interesting "sideline" stories, such as the Beale cipher, the Rosetta Stone, and the Navajo "code talkers" who played a key role in the Pacific theater during WWII.

My teenage son used to complain that most of the difficult subjects he learned in school would never have any use in real life. I gave him a copy of this book. The book is a compelling story of how science, engineering, mathematics, computer, linguistics, psychology are all critical pieces of this all-important game.

There are more technical treatises on this subject, and there are more lengthy and nuanced historical accounts on military intelligence as well. But this book is undoubtedly the best introduction to this uniquely fascinating subject.

I have always been fascinated by codes and Singh has put together a comprehensive book on the history of codes. Having read many books on codes, Singh was still able to enthrall me with some historical stories that I had not come across. It's not just technical stuff, but is written with the novice in mind as well. But the book holds enough technical information to keep the enthusiast interested as well. The version I bought has a crypt contest in the back, which I enjoyed working on - I was only able to solve the first 3 or so puzzles, but it was a lot of fun.

There was a pronounced sense amongst many British, let alone Germans that the Versailles treaty was overly vindictive and would only serve to sow the seeds of the next great conflict. At the end of 1919 J M Keynes published 'The economic consequences of the peace' . He took great pains to point out the folly of the French position at the conference, namely to be as extreme as possible, cognisant of the fact that their claims would be moderated and noted that in several cases where the British and US delegations had no specific interest, provisions were passed 'on the nod' which even the French would not have subscribed to. Keynes was damning about both Clemenceau and Wilson and pointed out that almost everything had been done which 'might impoverish Germany now or obstruct her development in future' and that to demand such colossal reparations without any real notion of whether Germany had the means to pay was foolhardy in the extreme. Keynes book provided a fulcrum for British doubt about the treaty and an avenue for British sympathy with the fledgling German Republic. Keynes made treaty revision a thing of morality and enlightened self interest to avoid 'sowing the decay of the whole of civilised life of Europe'.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace was written in 1920 by Keynes, who was not already recognized as the most influential economist of the 20th century, a condition he would only attain when he wrote his famous General Theory some years later, and can be interpreted as a personal outburst against the heads of state of the four countries who participated in the Group of Four (France, Italy, UK and the USA) and decided the fate not only of the defeated countries (Germany and Austria) but also of the whole world, in a way that Keynes was adamantly against and which led to his resignation of his capacity of an important negotiator in the British delegation. One has also to remember that Keynes had always been against the war and lost some important friends in the conflict.

The portrait he gives of the different negotiating abilities of French's Clemenceau, United States' president Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George is a devastating picture of the different motives each one of them had at the time: the aim of Clemenceau was to exact revenge to French's traditional enemy and to debilitate Germany as much as possible, thus postponing her return to prosperity and to menace again France. WIlson's, portrayed as a good man but lacking any negotiating feature a man of his stature should have, was a frail man only to save his face in the moral stances he took in his preliminary 14 points Armistice proposal, which led to the initial surrender of the Germans to the Allied forces. The British Lloyd George was only worried about upcoming elections in his country and was playing all the cards (good or bad) he had to save himself from an humiliating defeat to the Liberals.

The outcome of it all was a Peace Treaty who despised each and every point of reality, representing a burden Germany would not be able to pay, thus leading to the dismantling of an economic European system that led famine, social disturbance and finally to the World War II.

The book is a best-seller ever since and very easy to read and should be also recommended to every one interested in the power broker skills one has to have to succeed (Clemenceau) or fail (Wilson) in negotiation as hard as this one.

Great British economist John Maynard Keynes second book recounts his assessment of the economic consequences of the Treaty of Versailles, where he was a member of British delegation as an economic expert.
Keynes starts with providing a dazzling psychological analysis on how the treaty came to be.
"When President Wilson left Washinghton he enjoyed a prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequalled in history ... Never had a philosopher help such weapons wherewith to bind the princes of this world. How the crowds of the European capitals presses about the carriage of the President! With what curiosity, anxiety, and hope we sought a glimpse of the features and bearing of the man of destiny who, coming from the West, was to bring healing to the wounds of the ancient parent of this civilization and lay for us the foundations and the future"
Alas, this was not to be. American idealism, French quest for security and British distaste for alliances and hypocrisy created an unworkable solution. Soul of the treaty was sacrificed to placate domestic political process, and as the result put Germany in the position of defiance and economic insolvency; the position which at the bottom drew sympathy from the former Allies and as the result contributed to brutality of the second conflict.
Keynes draws a picture of pan-European economy which was destroyed by the treaty and rightfully predicted that not only Germany will not be able to pay, but will be obligated to pursue the expansionist policy at the expense of her weak Eastern neighbors. Treaty did not contain any positive economic programme for rehabilitation of the economic life of Central powers and Russia. One just could not disrupt the economic position of the greatest European land power, at the same time strengthening it geo-politically and suffer no horrible retribution. ""The Peace Treaty of Versailles: This is not Peace. It is an Armistice
for twenty years." - said Foch about such a agreement.

In this book, Jenkins describes his choice of the thousand best churches in England. Churches range from tiny, rural chapels notable for their remote, dramatic settings, to grand and majestic churches. (Cathedrals, however, are not covered, only parish churches.) He also rates the churches from one star through 5 stars.
The descriptions are generally full and compelling. However, I took off one star from my rating, because, for the armchair traveller, more pictures would have been welcome. (How frustrating to read about glorious stained glass windows, and have no idea what they actually look like!) Only about one in 10 churches is illustrated with either an interior or exterior photo.

For those interested in knowing more about England's wonderful parish churches, this book is a must. Organized by county, the book should prove useful for travellers like me who fall victim to every village spire. I appreciated both his wit and knowledge about the subject.

The history presented, and the wonderful photographs, are a panorama of architectural beauty and fascination topped only by Jenkins' insightful and witty comments. This is a perfect "coffee table volume" for anyone interested in the Church, the arts, or history, and for others who plan travel to areas of England they have not previously explored. An added bonus is that those passionate about any one of the topics will, as I have found, have the further entertainment of arguing whether Simon's choices actually were of the 1,000 best, and which of their own favourites would have topped them.

Delighted to find other Simon Raven fans do actually exist!He's been a seriously neglected novelist because most of his novelshave been out of print for over twenty years. A revival is long overdue, particularly before the old boy drops off the twig...Fantastically well-written novels and sublimely well-chosen language. END

The opening page of my hard cover copy of 'Fielding Gray' indicates it was the fourth book written in the Alms for Oblivion sequence, however, cronologically, it is the first. It is actually the last book I read in this sequence - I searched high and low for it for almost ten years, until I found two copies within weeks of each other, one in a charity shop in my old home town, where I hadn't lived for 20 years!

Fielding Gray, priviliged, handsome, charming, talented, manipulative, debauched, corrupt and a corrupter, emerged as the central and pivotal of the ten main characters in the sequence, even though he didn't appear at all in the first written book 'The Rich Pay Late' (cronologically fourth). He made a memorable but minor appearance in the second written, 'Friends in Low Places' (cronologically fifth), but became the undeniable star of the sequence in the third written, 'Sabre Squadron' (cronologically third).

'Fielding Gray' takes us back to where it all began - the summer term in 1945 at his public (in the UK, that means private) school begins with a thanksgiving service after the war in Europe. The acknowledged Golden Boy, destined for a glittering academic career, Fielding Gray gradually loses his innocence (via increasingly seedy sexual encounters) and is ultimately responsible for a devestating sexual tragedy, as his originally projected future slips away. However, some of his schoolday liaisons and friendships stay with him all his life.

The ten independent novels of the Alms for Oblivion sequence take a ironically cynical poke at the English upper-middle-class, involving academia, politics, journalism, the aristocracy, the army, etc. Disguised as bawdy tales of strange, often indecent passions, populated by a curiously likable contingent of debauched and corrupt characters, their associates and their victims, Simon Raven writes the most deliciously enjoyable, stylish, funny and clever social satire you will find (excepting, perhaps, Robertson Davis). Many of these characters crop up in his non-sequence novels, 'The Roses of Picardie', 'September Castle', etc., and they raise the second generation in a further sequence 'The First-born of Eqypt' (only seven novels this time!)

While many of Simon Raven's most memorable characters are people you would probably avoid having in your life, their tales provide vicarious enjoyment, an addiction that once started must continue until the very last word.

Even though I rarely re-read books, while researching this review I've come to realise I must read them all again, starting tonight!

Similar I suppose in style to Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, Raven's Alms series is a lighter and more devious, and is devilishly funny. Highly recommended - all volumes have now been re-released, and are worth picking up. I would say worth reading in the order they were written, rather than in chronological order, as this method was surely Raven's intention? Buy NOW!