great content, technically challenged
341192
Well, it's hard to go wrong with Lyle. This dvd gets a 4 because of the content.  He is in rare form with the "large band" being as great as ever including some phenomenal vibes with Francine Reed. It was good to see them all together again and the thing about Lyle in this dvd is he really seems to be LOVING being there. Randy Newman and Mark Isham were awesome. There are great shots of him and the band and I will confess that I didn't know he had blue eyes until now!

  Anyway, the biggest disappointment for me was the sound.  Almost returned the disc and thought better of it.  I think it is just the way it is.  It goes from a full concert/stereo big sound to a canned, far away sound.  That is the only way I can describe it.  I am curious to know if others had the same problem.  It also seemed like the lighting could have been better and the vision sharper.  I am comparing this to some James Taylor DVD's and a Sarah Macglaughlan (sp?) that I have.  Great content, but technically lacking.
3925715
The content of this book is excellent.
Navigation leaves a lot to be desired.
There are links from the answers back to the exercises, but not the other way around.
In a paper book it is possible to use pieces of paper or sticky notes to go to answers, vocab, verbs etc, but with this book I have to write everything down and then navigate with a slider. This was very irritating.
Jan Hall.
158746
Great information and graphics especially the color plates.  Unfortunately it is not easy to use as an e-book.  It is extremely difficult to navigate between the general text sections and the color plates.
2924944
Originally, I planned on giving this textbook at least a 4 star review, since at first, the concepts and step-by-step instructions were easy to understand, follow, and grasp. However, as I progress through each chapter, I'm noticing some very troubling patterns emerging that I want you to know about.

First, the author does to an excellent job of creating a narrative that is fairly easy to follow. You won't get lost using this book. He takes you along the road to completion of the book's project and helps keep the text free from sterile language. That said, certain limitations about a book like this become quite obvious.

To begin, this isn't a book you'd buy to learn Revit. Sound odd that I'd say that, but it's true. You aren't LEARNING Revit here. You're learning how to use Revit to complete a rote project. There's a important distinction between learning something and learning how to get a result. This book's purpose seems to be to get a result, not dive into the software and really know it.

For example, if you follow along per the author's instructions, you will achieve success. Great! But now test yourself. Put the book away and try to do it again on your own. Trouble? Likely, since the author does not devote much of the text to explain why you're performing certain steps. Just that you have to and you'll get a result. I wanted more "why do this", not just "do this", as learning software sometimes requires explanation of processes and correcting your own mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes: When you make a mistake, and it will happen, it's frustrating to have to rewind through the text to find where you "might" have made the mistake and correct it in your model. Sometimes you don't know if you've done something wrong until much later, and since the book is written in linear fashion (step 1,2,3...) for the entire project, it's unclear how to fix things. There isn't much depth of discussion about correcting errors, just "do this and it'll be done"!

Further, the book's publishing suffers from a bad case of "small graphicitis" where each figure shown in the book is printed at a low dpi and in b/w only, that it's often very confusing to understand the author's graphic examples. There were many times I had to experiment to find out what line or point he was referring to in figure x.x. In other words, this book should have been printed on heavier weight paper (not newsprint) and in full color to help clarify the author's examples.

I'm using this book for a college introduction course in Revit. The instructor and my fellow students have found numerous errors, omissions, or foolish procedures already (approx thru chapter 8) that the author should have corrected or re-written. I'm not saying the author is recklessly inaccurate, but it would serve students well to avoid rote methodology here.

Bottom line: While I'm sure it's tough to write a solid textbook, more emphasis should be placed on concepts and compulsory practice, rather than a "just do it my way and you'll have this cool building done" approach. I don't feel like I'm learning Revit. I feel like I'm making something in Revit, but I wouldn't pass any Revit cert testing.

Advice: seek additional sources of knowledge in other texts or online if you really want to know Revit Architecture.
1755647
Teo is an excellent author. The tutorials are very good and the granularity of detail is excellent. He uses the AdventureWorks2008
database for his tutorials. The only disappointment is I just got the book and pages and sections are falling out. Very poor binding job!
The book is an excellent resource for beginners as well as developers
with real world examples as well as tips, tricks and workarounds
1573167
Full of information, but lacking good use cases for the content
436549
The tutorials are really good, complex and thorough and the book does its' job of teaching you a lot about the tools in the program and how to make them do what you want them to. However, I had the book for a few days and pages began falling out of it. Not one or two but a lot. I never had a book do this before. The second complaint is that there seems to be a step left out of the tutorials here and there. I went crazy trying to figure out the brief introductory part about projecting a curve onto a surface to 'cut out' a shape; turns out it was because the instructions were incomplete.

The tutorials themselves are otherwise great and I still recommend this book despite these annoying flaws.
1102656
I just finished reading this book. I wish I could give it 4.5 stars, but I can't. For an author's first attempt at writing a book, especially self-publishing it, I feel that this was a stellar effort. I will continue to recommend this book to people wanting to get started in security or build a home lab to improve their skillsets.

I knocked off one star because there are quite a few grammar mistakes, repetition within paragraphs, and a handful of sentences that just didn't make sense. The black and white print and the screenshots were kind of grainy in a few instances. Page headers with the chapter or section name would help quite a bit as well versus looking up a section in the table of contents and flipping directly to the page number. Nevertheless, this is a fantastic resource and I am unaware of any book or guide available right now that can hold a candle to this work.

These production value issues, as well as some other technical matters, were addressed in the epilogue. I would have liked to see a few additional technologies outlined in this book, but it is already massive and I understand that it would not have been practical to include all of these topics. Maybe this could be made into a volume of books in the future?

I agree with the author that guides such as this book and the people who actually slog through them are needed more now than ever. There is a tremendous amount of information out there to digest for newcomers in the security field, but not enough material to glue it all together. This book tied together dozens of software packages and concepts together in a manner that is easy to comprehend for someone with a basic IT skillset. Sometimes, this is precisely what is needed over being subjected to dry manuals that leave the reader with more questions than answers.
2314634
First, the content. For someone who has never used a personal computer of any kind, this is a fine introductory text on what you can do and how you do it. It's complete, and detailed, and covers not only OS X but many of the bundled applications. However, I do mean "of any kind"; if you've used Windows, or earlier versions of Mac OS X, this doesn't describe the differences you'll encounter.

So, four star content. But the visual design is awful. Margins are too small. Screenshots are abused all over the place: do I really need a shot of the entire desktop to illustrate how to find an application icon in the dock, for every app? The choice of fonts - both styles and sizes - contributes to the jarring visual experience. (The lead-in paragraphs are particularly egregious examples of how expanded spacing can make text less readable.) And just because you can color-code everything doesn't mean you should....

I will be passing my copy of this book on to an elderly relative who is coming up to speed on the Mac. I think she'll find it useful - but I will apologize in advance about the jarring visual style.
3935172
This review is for the Kindle version of this book.  I haven't seen the print version.

I need to split this into two sections; one for the overall content and one for the design and layout.

As far as knowledge content goes this book is a great primer on locks, how they function and the mechanisms and tools employed for bypassing them. Deviant has a wonderful talent for taking technical knowledge and delivering it in a conversational tone that makes it easy to understand and retain. I've seen others try and share the same information and it just falls flat. On that level alone, this book gets five stars.

Where layout and formatting is concerned, the book needs some serious help. It looks as though the rough draft was approved for publication. The irregular fashion in which images and notations are inserted into the flow of text and the seemingly random sized boxes used to separate them looks jarring and amateurish.

I don't understand why he chose to use greyscale versions of his lock diagrams. I've seen the slide presentations where they were originally used and in full color, they very clearly differentiate the components of the lock and allow for highlighting and directing the reader's focus to the pertinent portion of the image. In greyscale, they lose virtually all of their impact. The inclusion of a single color image (Figure 3.7) is a horrible tease and I wonder why it was included.

As for the photography, many of the photos used have blown out contrast to the point of rendering the image barely usable. It's likely because they were converted from color to greyscale as well, but that's just a guess.

Overall, this book is an amazing resource.  I've seen most of the information in various sources before but Deviant has pulled together all of the basics (and then some) into a single location and presents it all in a very user friendly fashion.  I just wish some more thought/time/effort was devoted to the design and layout of the book.  In it's current form, it's a lead-off stand-up double.  Clean it up and fix the design issues and it's a walk-off home run.
3674076
The content of this book is incredibly thorough and I'm excited to dive deeper into the pedagogy. The use of Hyperdocs is truly transforming for teachers and students!! The screenshots are really hard to read, if not impossible in some cases. More specifically, the size and clarity of the screenshots need to improve. I'm in the publishing industry and am a little surprised this book went to market with poor quality screenshots.
3242195
This is quite a useful book, as has been well documented in other reviews.  The tips are helpful, the examples are useful, and the typography and layout are easy on the eyes.

However -- and this is a big however -- the book is riddled with technical errors.  The errata file, available for download from the publisher as a PDF file, currently runs a whopping 11 pages.  While a small handful of errors in a technical book's first edition is inevitable, 11 pages is not a small handful for a book as thin as this.  It's really inexcusable that so many errors -- some of them quite obvious -- made it past the editor.
153762
This is a very difficult book to read, which is a pity as I think the  French version must be good. The content is well structured given its  highly technical nature. The presentation is superior to similar books on  Linux (which seem to think it's OK use the source code to explain the  source code.) The authors clearly know their stuff. All the right  ingredients.
Unfortunately the translation to English is dreadful.  Another Amazon reviewer suggested it was done using a computer. I can't  really tell, but the effect is that I was unable to concentrate on the  topic at hand. Instead I was trying to understand the sometimes nonsensical  grammar, or grind my way through sentences full of thoughtless reuse of a  particular word. (The processes chapter  has an great example, five  instances of the word 'process' in two lines of prose.) Even a translator  program might try a synonym once in a while!
Though the presentation is  better than other Linux  technical publications, it still has the feel of a  'techie' book. Classic books on similar subjects, for example those by Bach  or Tanenbaum, manage to avoid printing endless tables full of useless data,  yet they still educate the reader. It's a matter  of personal taste of  course, but in my opinion the editor could have saved a good deal of paper  simply by tactful application of the delete key.
I guess it must be tough  to find someone who has enough understanding of both written English and  programming to translate such a book, but it's a shame they didn't do a  better job. I have seen it done well with equally tough topics.
I hope  there's a new edition for Linux 2.2, but I wouldn't recommend buying it  unless they get someone else to do the English version.
1917376
The content of the book is pretty good. The author explains the subjects very clear even for a begginer like me.
The only complain I have is that the steps to install the software were tedious, inaccurate and not so clear to me. And I think that the software interface needs to be improved. Also, keep in mind that you can install the software in only 1 machine.
1018562
On the positive: I am learning a lot from this book.  The authors have an excellent approach to presenting the material, and at least for me, I feel the broad brush concepts they present, especially in organizing game code are very good.  What is absolutely mind boggling is the number of typos in the constantly referenced source code.  You are supposed to be building your code on previous exercises (good idea), however there are often changes to function and variable names, forcing you to debug code that is presented to you as an example.  Perhaps it wouldn't be as glaring if they hadn't preceded every source sample in the book with the phrase 'we have highlighted the code that is different from that game.', when as it turns out there are often dozens of other subtle changes you'll need to catch yourself.

Inconsistent, or inaccurate information presented in source code presented as educational reference is a complete fail.
1434087
Let me start by saying that photographs in this book are worth 5 stars. The problem with the tome is the text. For some odd reason the text included is in three languages - which wouldn't be a problem in and of itself - but the layout of the text is confusing as hell. This book could have used a much better layout editor to maintain a consistent flow from pictures to the multi-lingual text. If you can overcome the difficulty of the layout the pictures are well worth the effort.
2476116
good technical information not easily available elsewhere