This is one of the single greatest books that I have ever had the privelage of reading. The writer describes in clear and concise terms the price of liberty, how we won it, and how we are losing it. You wont find this information in any government school or college.
Delightfully this book is an easy read. The author wrote this book with the common man in mind. Splendidly I tore through this book in no time at all without having to read a single sentence twice.
Patriots, students, and anybody dedicated to preseving liberty and economic freedom should definately read this masterpiece. Its amazing that the information in this book is surpressed from our schools. Everybody should read this book twice and buy copies for all your family and friends.

Stated Simply, this book is the single best, easily comprehendable book on Americanism.

The author doesn't woo you with complex legal citings, boggle your mind with twists in logical and fanciful leaps.

In fact this book will help you indentify what kind of American you are, what kind of American you truely want to be, and how to recognize the difference between Real-Americans and those who claim or even think that they are being patriotic, but are are undermining the country we live in, mostly through confussion and inaction.

I wish I could afford to buy a copy for every person alive, it should be required reading for all Americans.

Think again! Read this book and find out if you know what being an American means. Are you an American, a Pseudo-American, or a Socialist? You can only be one or the other. Want to know more about our "Founding Fathers"? What does Patriotism mean? Is the Constitution our Country? Why is this important to us in our lives today? Do we live as citizens free of tyranny? People paid to form our Country - there is no such thing as a "free Country." What form of Government do we have? What do our fellow individuals we elected to govern us today think it is? How can you tell? Want to see what it was like to live back in the 1700's in our Country and see how smart our citizens were? Would you like to see their character? Actions speak louder than words. Then choose to read this book!

This book used to be the bible of image formats. Unfortunately, this bible is starting to show its age. Depending on what your interest is in graphics, you might find all the formats you need or be really disappointed. Most major image formats (like those used in web pages) are in there, but some very important ones that have appeared in the past 5 or so years are missing: Avid's OMFI, Softimage .pic, Maya's .iff, Pixar .tx, etc. The lack of an extensions index is an area where the book fails for me as an encyclopedia. While the final index does lists extension names, having a separate index for them would be nicer. So that if you had a file with extension .pic which you cannot read, you could easily figure out what formats it could correspond to. This is a problem with AVI, which is listed as Microsoft RIFF. Funny thing the book mentions that most people know AVIs by their extensions, but unless you look in the index, you will think it was missing. Still, some Microsoft image formats are missing (.ico files, for example). Other contradictions like those are listing the format for Pixar's .rib files, but not for their .tx files. Yes, the book also has descriptions of several popular non-image formats, such as 3D scene & object formats (Wavefront, Inventor, Radiance, etc), which can be either an annoyance or an added bonus depending on what you are looking. Animation formats (Quicktime, etc) are introduced but not covered in detail and given web links to search for more information. Formats not covered in the book are VRML, font formats (TrueType, etc), or Audio formats. If you are looking for source code or a library you can use to plug into your application, you will be very disappointed. The CD-ROM is just a web reprinting of all the info in the book, and the only software provided is Mosaic, a first & now slowest web browser, which in this day and age of Netscape and IE, is a big annoyance and a waste of disk space (you have to install it, since the installer looks for it & pages are named .ht_ instead of .htm or .html!). On a more positive note, the book offers beginners a good introduction to coding image loaders -- warning & providing solutions to problems such as byte ordering, alignment, etc. RLE encoding is given a very thorough description with several of its possible variations. The principles of other types of encoding (LZW, Huffman, CCITT, JPEG & Fractal) are described but not in so much detail. Wavelets are not even mentioned. In summary, most of the information is nothing you cannot get on the web if you spend enough time searching. The book & CD needs to be updated for the new millenium and since it is already pretty heavy, I would vote to split it in two: one for image formats and one for 3D formats.

My only negative comment: The section on GIFs doesn't discuss animated GIFs. There's just a little note that "the format supports multiple images in a file, but this is rarely used". If only they knew back then...

I've kept this book next to my computer desk for quite some time because I consider it an essential reference. There has never been a question about graphic file formats that I haven't been able to answer using this book. I feel the authors have done an outstanding job describing everything from the basics to complex file format features in a language that someone who isn't an artist can understand. As an application developer, I often need to know what's going on behind the scenes and this book makes everything clear.

This book is getting a tad dated, but still extremely valuable and a good buy. I'd love to see the authors update it. I know that I'd be the first in line to get the next edition.

I am not sure who this book the 'committee' wrote this for, but I can think of no one. More like a hodge-podge collection of Internet clippings somewhat related to Java & Macs, interspersed with useless code. It is sad because the Mac market needs a Java book covering getting started and the many options and tools Apple has provided the Java student & developer.

I am sorry I wasted my money & was responsible for the deaths of the trees that made it!

This is probably the worst technical book that I have read. Its more a collection of papers than anything else, and much of the content is trivial. Beginning progrmmers would find nothing in here. Advanced programmers will probably find a few nuggets of information that are useful, but they are few and far between.

If you are looking for an excellent book on Java on the new Macintosh operating system OS X, this is one to get. The writing style is well done and the book, in terms of content, is well thought out. I am enjoying the authors coverage of pure Java vs Mac OS X specific issues in particular. Keep up the good job.