The following review of "Rendering with Radiance" was published in the November 1998 issue of "Lighting Design + Application" magazine. It has been posted to AMAZON.COM by the author.

Ian Ashdown, P. Eng., LC byHeart Consultants Limited 620 Ballantree Road West Vancouver, BC Canada V7S 1W3 e-mail: byheart@acm.org

Lighting Design + Application contact:

Mark Newman, Editor Lighting Design + Application Illuminating Engineering Society of North America 120 Wall Street, 17th Floor New York, NY 10005 Tel: (212) 248-5000

Rendering with Radiance Greg Ward Larson and Rob Shakespeare ISBN 1-55860-499-5, Hard Cover 664 pages; 1998; Morgan Kaufmann Publishers

Many LD+A readers know Radiance as a lighting design and analysis program that was developed by Greg Ward (Larson) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Those who have investigated Radiance know that it is freely available, but usable only if you have a UNIX workstation and the patience to master more than 50 software tools. In ten years, it has attracted a coterie of fewer than 400 dedicated users.

Rendering with Radiance will undoubtedly change this. Originally conceived as a UNIX-style technical manual, the book is much more. It offers several tutorials, numerous application examples, and detailed discussions of the program's underlying mathematical algorithms. The accompanying CD-ROM includes example images, Radiance models and material libraries, reference manuals, and fully commented C source code for Radiance 3.1.

Despite first impressions, this book is not about computer graphics. The Radiance Lighting Simulation and Rendering System was created for advanced lighting designers and academic researchers, and more than half of the book is devoted to applying Radiance to real-world lighting problems. Ward Larson, Shakespeare and three contributing experts discuss luminaire modeling and lighting analysis, daylight simulation, animation, roadway lighting, theatre lighting, and exterior lighting. Even if you have committed yourself to using architectural visualization programs such as Lightscape and RadioRay, you will find an abundance of useful information in this book.

Radiance is the only software program that faithfully models the physical behavior of light, especially specular and semispecular reflections. It has a steep learning curve, but the quality of the architectural renderings it produces is unequalled by any commercial product. With Rendering with Radiance, we now have a user's manual that fully complements the capabilities of its namesake.

This truly is a remarkable book. Unlike most computer graphics texts, it presents lengthy discussions of IES photometric data files, luminance meters and spectrophotometers, the CIE overcast sky model, roadway light metrics, veiling luminance, spectral transmission data, and much more. The major algorithms used by Radiance are fully documented, including discussions of their limitations. There is more information in this book on lighting software use and design than can be found in all other books combined.

The major disadvantage of Radiance is that it was developed for UNIX workstations. In the past, this restricted the use of the program (really a set of UNIX tools) mostly to academic researchers. However, the freely-available and popular UNIX clone Linux now allows Radiance to be run with few difficulties on Windows and Macintosh computers.

As a contributor to the text, I am a bit biased, but I do think you will find the book's numerous chapters very helpful for folks of a wide range of skill levels. It is a great resource guide, reference book and tutorial. It includes the Radiance executables for a few Unix platforms on the CD-ROM! These alone will save you an hour or two. The book is well worth the money, but don't take my word for it.

I first saw this book at my mother-in-law's house and just loved it. I grew up in San Diego and it was fascinating to see the before and after photographs of places where I grew up. The book is full of great photographs and interesting historical text to go with it.

A fast paced detective adventure with just enough horror/supernatural to remind you of Ken Robinson's Doc Savage

This book is not terribly easy to use. But that's because Navajo is not terribly easy to speak -- or (looking at it the other way) to analyze. So I caution readers that they should spend some time learning the organization of the lexicon before they expect to be able to use it fluently.

However, this book is /the/ must-own book for anyone who studies Navajo language or culture. Its thoroughness (somewhere over twenty-five thousand entries, I think) is astounding.

Although this is a book about the historical development of that fertile field in Art called "Conceptual", it is really a ground work on understanding and using the ideas found in the history of the field for use on computers and telecomunications devices.

The essays gathered here will give the reader much to think about in how they perceive Art and Technology and the philosophical basis for a new aesthetics.

Once thought passe, the reader will find that the foundations of Conceptual Art is alive and well, and that it is anything but passe with our relationships to new developing technologies.

Humor helps healing, and this casette is perfect for the bed-ridden invalid. You simply can't keep from laughing!

Most students who have taken a semester course in compiler would agree that a semester is too short even for just building a compiler, not to include the time used to learn the basics like parsing. This book is a good start at where your course left off. It covers many interesting and modern topics on building an _optimizing_ compiler, a compiler that generates compact and speedy code.

As a comparison to the Muchnick one, this book is slightly less advanced but contains sufficient details to start one in this field. This book also excels in its clear and informative explanations.

An interesting feature of this book (and also Muchnick) is that no concrete code/implementation is included. The focus is on the concepts of building an optimizing compiler and the theory behind code optimization, not exactly on how to build one (from scratch) using whatever programming language. The reader must come up with the implementation side of the story if she wants to apply the techniques to her own compiler.

As a final note, this is not an introductory book on compilers. If you want one, go find the classic Dragon book (by Aho, Sethi, Ullman) or the newly written work by Appel.

The Children's Daily Devotional Bible is great! The stories are easy to read and understand, with wonderful illustrations. The memory verse is broken into 5 segments to make it easier for the child to retain. This devotional book is geared to involve the parent with the child - making the experience richer. I would recommend it to every parent. I purchased one for my grandson, who is not yet 2, and plan to read it to him until he is able to read it for himself.

I read a four-volume set of the collected writings of Clement Greenberg and consider this to be the fifth book, even though a different editor put it together. It wraps up what I read earlier and clarifies what little Greenberg had left to clarify of his aesthetic. Granted it is only one man's opinions, but what opinions! Even if you don't agree with many of his individual ideas, he gives off a profound sense of understanding the ins and out of Modern Art. Further, if what he states is Modern, you are left with a sense of what must be Postmodern. He touches briefly on that topic as well.

I recommend this book both for artists and for anyone attempting to understand Modern Art. Greenberg's writing became a little thicker as he aged, but he is about as down-to-earth as a critic of his type can be. You might have to run to the dictionary here and there, but that is a small price to pay for what you get in return. If you are frustrated with other art critics being too opaque, Greenberg is a good alternative. Well, I can't help but add that, to me, he is one of the definitive critics of Modern Art!