The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit : Expert Methods for Designing, Developing, and Deploying Data Warehouses

Amazon.com

In The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit, authors Ralph Kimball, Laura Reeves, Margy Ross, and Warren Thornthwaite present a structure for undertaking the awesome task of implementing a data warehouse. As part of a rather select group of professionals actually experienced in building data warehouses, the authors attempt to convey their expertise about how to approach the job. The book focuses on the "Star Lifecycle"--a high-level project-planning approach to evolving existing information systems into an ever-changing data-warehouse solution. --Stephen Plain

Book Description

"A comprehensive, thoughtful, and detailed book that will be of inestimable value to anyone struggling with the complex details of designing, building, and maintaining an enterprise-wide decision support system. Highly recommended." -Robert S. Craig, Vice President, Application Architectures, Hurwitz Group, Inc.

In his bestselling book, The Data Warehouse Toolkit, Ralph Kimball showed you how to use dimensional modeling to design effective and usable data warehouses. Now, he carries these techniques to the larger issues of delivering complete data marts and data warehouses. Drawing upon their experiences with numerous data warehouse implementations, he and his coauthors show you all the practical details involved in planning, designing, developing, deploying, and growing data warehouses. Important topics include:
* The Business Dimensional Lifecycle(TM) approach to data warehouse project planning and management
* Techniques for gathering requirements more effectively and efficiently
* Advanced dimensional modeling techniques to capture the most complex business rules
* The Data Warehouse Bus Architecture and other approaches for integrating data marts into super-flexible data warehouses
* A framework for creating your technical architecture
* Techniques for minimizing the risks involved with data staging
* Aggregations and other effective ways to boost data warehouse performance
* Cutting-edge, Internet-based data warehouse security techniques

The CD-ROM supplies you with:
* Complete data warehouse project plan tasks and responsibilities
* A set of sample models that demonstrate the Bus Architecture
* Blank versions of the templates and tools described in the book
* Checklists to use at key points in the project

Customer Reviews:

From a newbie ..........2007-06-28

I just used this for a class and I thought it was a good book. I'm a data warehouse newbie and it was easy to understand and presented a lot of information that was very useful. I think it will be a good reference down the road.

Very difficult to read.......2007-05-07

I find this book very difficult to read and understand. It tells you a great deal about what you're supposed to do to build a warehouse but does not tell you how to do it.

Excelent but to many repeatings..........2007-01-09

Excelent book for introduction to data warehouse architecture. However author makes a lot of repeating about conformed dimensions and conformed facts. This book could be half sized without these. Yet, I am very happy to own it. Recommended for every developer.

The Data Warehouse Lifecycle Toolkit.......2006-03-10

The bible of Data Warehousing by the guru of the Data Warehouse for all levels of expertise.

Excellence for starter and advanced data warehouse practioners.......2005-10-24

For a data warehouse novice this excellent starting point and it take through the advance concepts. In short, it's a reference book for any data warehouse practitioner

Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 3.0 (Expert's Voice in .Net)

Average customer rating:

A great book
Better than attending a hands on training course
Best Workflow book available
Clear and Thorough
Very Thorough

Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 3.0 (Expert's Voice in .Net)
Bruce Bukovics
Manufacturer: Apress
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Pro WPF: Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0

Accessories:

Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System
Pro C# with .NET 3.0, Special Edition (Pro)
Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005 (Expert's Voice in Sharepoint)

ASIN: 1590597788

Book Description

Windows Workflow Foundation is a ground-breaking addition to the core of the .NET Framework that allows you to orchestrate human and system interactions as a series of workflows that can be easily mapped, analyzed, adjusted, and implemented.

As business problems become more complex, the need for a workflow-based solution has never been more evident. WF provides a simple and consistent way to model and implement complex problems. As a developer, you focus on developing the business logic for individual workflow tasks. The runtime handles the execution of those tasks after they have been composed into a workflow.

Pro WF: Windows Workflow in .NET 3.0 provides you with the skills you need to incorporate WF in your applications. This book gets you up to speed with Windows Workflow Foundation quickly and comprehensively. The practical aspects of using WF are covered in a lively tutorial style with each workflow concept illustrated in C#. This book also includes detailed coverage of how to customize your workflows and access them in a variety of ways and situations so you can maximize the advantages of this technology.

Customer Reviews:

A great book.......2007-09-18

This is a well written book that I have read in recent times. If you are .net developer and looking for the nuts of bolts of WF, you need this book. I have read only 3 chapters and already very impressed with the author. The author explains in DETAIL everything about workflow. In fact the author also explains about unit testing a workflow. Great Book!

Better than attending a hands on training course.......2007-07-06

This is by far the best book in the market on WF for a programmer. If you do its programming exercises it easily replaces a 5-day hands on training course. Now that is a great ROI. The book is very easy to read and understand.

I would recommend the Essential Workflow Foundation by Dharma Shukla as a companion book. This one gives an insight into what .NET 3.0 WF does in the background to make it all happen. Also if you were to try to use WF without Visual Studio, Dharma Shukla book would be the right one to pick as it does not use VS at all.

Best Workflow book available.......2007-06-25

I read through all of the available books on WF and this was definitely the best. Pro WF has a lot of practical information missing in a lot of other books. In particular, the sections on rules, exception handling, and web service hosting are worth the price of the book all by themselves. If you want to know how, and why, to use WF in your real every-day programming then this is the book for you.

Clear and Thorough.......2007-06-20

I am a colleague of the author's and recently got the opportunity to investigate using Workflow Foundation for a business application. Not knowing much about this component of .NET 3.0 and having only read some introductory material about it on MSDN, I found this book to be an excellent place to start learning it for real.

This book is very clear and thorough and works through the subject in an organized and methodical way. The fact that it's written by a single author is a benefit, since it gives a more coherent treatment of the subject than some technical books written by several (or even many) people.

The text includes solid examples that don't go overboard with irrelevant tangents. I was also impressed that the author tackled some of the more difficult aspects of this technology, like hosting the workflow designer in your own applications.

I would recommend this to anybody who wants to get a deeper understanding of Workflow Foundation.

Very Thorough.......2007-06-13

I've read a few books so far on WF and I find the MSDN documentation to lack details, and most other books to also not go into enough details. Pro WF answered all my questions where the other books did not and now that I have a good foundation in WF, I still go back to it to look up details of various topics.

Developing Grading and Reporting Systems for Student Learning (Experts In Assessment Series)

Average customer rating:

Developing Grading and Reporting Systems for Student Learning (Experts In Assessment Series)
Thomas R. Guskey , and Jane M. Bailey
Manufacturer: Corwin Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Transforming Classroom Grading
How to Grade for Learning: Linking Grades to Standards
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Classroom Assessment & Grading That Work

ASIN: 080396854X

Book Description

Teachers, parents, students, administrators, and community members all agree that we need better grading and reporting systems. Often, these systems are inadequate because they are part of a tradition that can go unexamined and unquestioned for years. Here is the first serious look at the issue, written to provide all those involved — especially teachers — with a coherent and thoughtful framework.

Guskey and Bailey offer four pillars of successful grading and reporting systems:

Communication is the primary goal of grading and reporting
Grading and reporting are integral parts of the instructional process
Good reporting is based on good evidence
Creating change in grading and reporting requires creating a multi-faceted reporting system

Written to help readers develop a deeper and more reflective understanding of the various aspects of the subject, Thomas Guskey and Jane Bailey’s work brings organization and clarity to a murky and disagreement-filled topic.

Here is a practical and essential guide for teachers, administrators or anyone concerned with understanding and implementing best practices in grading and reporting systems.

Average customer rating:

"Pro InfoPath 2007" useful for technical and business people alike
Again a lot of sales hype
A Jump Start to Building InfoPath Solutions!
Really good book. A+++++++++++
This is a great book.

Pro InfoPath 2007 (Expert's Voice)
Philo Janus
Manufacturer: Apress
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Designing Forms for Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services 2007 (Microsoft .NET Development Series)
Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System
SharePoint 2007 User's Guide: Learning Microsoft's Collaboration and Productivity Platform
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Administrator's Companion
Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005 (Expert's Voice in Sharepoint)

Accessories:

Workflow in the 2007 Microsoft Office System
Pro C# with .NET 3.0, Special Edition (Pro)
Microsoft SharePoint: Building Office 2007 Solutions in C# 2005 (Expert's Voice in Sharepoint)

ASIN: 1590597303

Book Description

Pro InfoPath 2007 is an excellent book for developers trying to learn the scope and range of application forms that can be built with Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007. InfoPath is now in its 2nd generation and it enables the creation of rich desktop and web forms using XML technologies and allows gathering of structured, business-critical information. Together with Microsoft Windows SharePoint Server 2007, InfoPath allows built-in integration with back-end processes, databases, and work flow, and provides developers with rich tools to build enterprise-wide forms solutions.

During the development and stabilization phase of InfoPath 2007, Philo worked closely with the product team to testfeatures, provide feedback on scenarios, and to build and apply solutions for the government and public sector. He haspoured all that experience in an engaging manner into this book--a great read for every developer trying to learnInfoPath.

— Kamaljit Bath, Principal Program Manager Lead, Microsoft Office InfoPath and Forms Services

InfoPath enables users to design forms and publish them for use by other users. It combines the ease of use of Access forms with the enterprise scalability of a network-based platform. Microsoft's goal with InfoPath is to get form design and maintenance out of the IT shop and onto the desktop, while maintaining the power of connecting to web services or a SQL Server. Since InfoPath is wholly XML-based, it is easy to introduce it into a heterogeneous enterprise environment -- via web services InfoPath can act as the interface for any back end system. InfoPath 2007, coupled with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, adds the ability to deploy InfoPath forms in a web browser with no client side application. SharePoint and Office 2007 have leveraged InfoPath in many other ways -- making InfoPath forms part of the workflow engine embedded in SharePoint, and using InfoPath forms to capture and maintain arbitrary metadata in Office documents.

Pro InfoPath 2007 was written so that developers can read it as an introduction to InfoPath 2007, as well as use it as a reference for common tasks. Targeted at developers, power users should also find a lot of value in this book to learn how to design and use forms in InfoPath.

This book will show form designers how to:

Use InfoPath to fill in electronic forms
Design and publish forms
Connect to data sources to read and publish data
Design and leverage the power of InfoPath views
Work with SharePoint form libraries to get the most out of InfoPath form data
Import existing Word and Excel forms into InfoPath
Create workflows with SharePoint Designer
Work with digital signatures

In addition, developers will learn how to:

Create an InfoPath form template based on a data connection or web service
Publish InfoPath form templates as content types
Create custom task panes for InfoPath forms
Understand SharePoint information management policies
Write .Net code behind InfoPath forms and browser forms
Create an add-in to extend the capabilities of InfoPath
Create a custom workflow for SharePoint, embedding InfoPath forms for gathering information
Build a .Net web service that InfoPath can connect to
Use Altova's XMLSpy to work with InfoPath form templates

Customer Reviews:

"Pro InfoPath 2007" useful for technical and business people alike.......2007-09-09

There are all too many technical books that are heavy on theory and light on "how to", or start out in an introductory fashion and then suddenly venture into highly technical territory without including the necessary background information needed to understand the content.

In "Pro InfoPath 2007", Philo Janus neatly avoids these pitfalls. Since he's writing about a product with whom most readers may not be familiar, he first answers the vital question, "What IS InfoPath?" with a comprehensive introduction to the product. Then Janus carefully outlines the capabilities of InfoPath and walks the reader through the steps necessary to create InfoPath forms in all kinds of environments; how to meet business needs in a myriad of situations; and most importantly, includes possible issues and limitations that one might encounter when using InfoPath and provides the necessary workarounds.

My own company has InfoPath installed but despite an enterprise-wide need for exactly what InfoPath does, is resistant to its use because of a fundamental lack of understanding of the software and how to best deploy it. A read of this book would convince them that they have a good product sitting on the shelf that would meet their needs and interface neatly with Sharepoint and other applications already in use.

Thumbs up to Philo Janus for a job well done.

Again a lot of sales hype.......2007-09-07

Microsoft writes a lot of sales hype about how terrific a product is but rarely explains what a product can and cant do. After days of asking I have yet to find out what Infopath exactly does and what it is capable of. We have documents in our office. It would be a blessing if people could go to our website fill out a form and then email the data to us so that we could then merge that data into a word document. Simply recieve an email in outlook after a client has input data on our website and then merge the data into word.

It looks as if Infopath might do that function but most people have never even heard of the product although it has existed since 2003.

After days on the internet I have yet to discover if this product can do that or exactly what product could do that. Infopath is not a popular product because of just that reason it is a mystery full of mis-information. Why is it we have to buy a book or buy a product to determine whether or not we need it??? I wish that the author (and Micro soft) would explain exactly what Infopath does and what we would be taught. I wont buy the product or read the book if you cant determine what I am about to learn, what it offers or why I need it.

A Jump Start to Building InfoPath Solutions!.......2007-08-06

This tiny book, in comparison with other technical manuals, is a fantastic way to get up to speed with InfoPath in a very short time. I'd never had the opportunity to work with InfoPath before, until my company decided to implement MOSS 2007 with InfoPath Forms services. I bought this book and in a few short days we were churning out InfoPath business solutions.
This book is an easy weekend read and then you are ready to go!

Really good book. A+++++++++++.......2007-07-30

This book is just great. Good coverage in around 300 pages. I totally dislike huge development books that just harp around. This book covers all the necessary topics with examples... A++++++++++++++++ for Philo Janus

This is a great book........2007-04-27

If you are doign anything with InfoPath 2007 then get this book!!! This book is an easy and informative read. The author even tries to make it his goal that this can be a weekend read. Not like your typical mind numbing rehash of the tech manuals. Philo not only describes what InfoPath 2007 is but gives real example that you can take into work.

The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer (Expert's Voice in Net)

Average customer rating:

Very useful book
Good But Not Definitive
Not for the grammer police
Sixteen superbly organized and presented chapters
Very elegant new approach

The Definitive Guide to Windows Installer (Expert's Voice in Net)
Phil Wilson
Manufacturer: Apress
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Deploying .NET Applications: Learning MSBuild and ClickOnce (Expert's Voice in .Net)
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Deploying .Net (Patterns & Practices) (Patterns & Practices)
Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed (WPF) (Unleashed)

ASIN: 1590592972

Book Description

Virtually every book written for software developers stops when the program is complete. Unfortunately, they leave out a critical part - creating the software that installs the application, component or service you just wrote. For a company building and shipping software, the installation might be the first time the customer has seen the product or company, and the installation experience will make a lasting impression one way or the other. An unreliable installation will affect the customer’s image of the overall software and company.

This book covers every aspect of using the Windows installer - the underlying installer technology in Windows.

Download Description

Customer Reviews:

Very useful book.......2007-06-11

This book covers in a simply and useful way several aspects of Windows Installer. I suggest this book as a "bible" for those programmers who needs to customize their installation procedure. Obviously this book does not resolve all the problems related to Windows Installer, but offers a valid guide to start to resolve them.

Good But Not Definitive.......2005-07-28

I say it's not definitive because I think that means there's nothing more to be said on the subject. The MS Windows Installer technology is huge, and it would take a book five times the length of this one to be definitive. This book describes the client/server architecture of the installer and explains about the important tables in the database. It demonstrates how to make an installation package with Visual Studio, but assumes you will be using a commercial package in real life. To get the most out of the book, you'll need to install Orca, which is available in the Microsoft Installer SDK. Orca lets you view and edit the tables in an installation package.
After a bit of orientation, each chapter tackles a common installation topic: patches, ASP.NET, .NET assemblies, windows services, and the installer APIs. Wilson is good about explaining why something should be done a certain way and giving you the background to understand it.
My only disappointment is that, due to the shortness of the book, there is no room to go into more detail about some of the standard actions. I'd like to have seen an example of the minimal set of actions needed to install a file; kind of the hello world of installer. The beginning example he provides is built with Visual Studio, and I'm sure it puts in a lot more actions than are really needed, so it's hard to mentally associate what the package is doing with the action records that are doing it. To really understand how the installer works, you should be able to build a package from scratch with Orca.
There are few or no typos, which is amazing for a computer book nowadays, and I didn't find any errors of fact.

Not for the grammer police.......2005-03-24

I liked that this was a Windows Installer book. I also liked how short it was (less than 300 pages). The author has an impressive resume which is at odds with the books grammer. It was like reading something printed verbatim, and this got annoying very quickly. I'm no english major, but whoever edited this book should re-edit and try again.
Run on sentences, and redundancies aside, this book provided gutsy insight into the Windows Installer world. You soon find out why there are companies that specialise in making installation software.
Since theres not much to choose from, this book will probably be a top pick for many. However, I found it difficult to read, expecting somewhat better "english".

Sixteen superbly organized and presented chapters.......2004-09-11

Specifically designed and written on an intermediate to advanced user level, The Definitive Guide To Windows Installer by Windows expert Phil Wilson fully lives up to the promise of its title. This informed and informative "how to" manual will enable users to create windows installer setups for all categories of .NET applications ranging from Windows Forms, to Services, to Web projects, including traditional COM applications. Sixteen superbly organized and presented "user friendly" chapters are devoted to every aspect of Windows Installers. Of special interest are that chapters specifically addressing "Updates Using Patches"; How-Tos, Tips, and Gotchas"; "Tools and Futures". The Definitive Guide To Windows Installer is a strongly recommended reference for both personal and professional Windows reference collections.

Very elegant new approach.......2004-06-19

Many developers who write applications for a Microsoft operating system know all too well of installation hazards. The possibility of introducing DLLs that are incompatible with existing DLLs, for example. Plus lots more things that could fail. Wilson starts off his book with a listing of what could traditionally go wrong in an installation.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but this was a wretched state of affairs. You typically had programming expertise in your particular field. But there should have been no a priori reason why this expertise should have to stretch to the installation process. Right?

Wilson gives an alternative. He details how you can use Windows Installer to install and uninstall your application. The process is still nontrivial, mind you. Which is why we have a book of this length. But it shows how, if you fit your application within WI's strictures, then the entire install is now much easier and safer.

Perhaps the single best advantage is that WI makes your install a transaction. Either it all works, or the install will fail and your system will be unaffected. Atomic. We have rollback ability.

Those of you familiar with SQL and transaction processing will recognise this. Wilson shows that WI is in fact based on SQL tables and relational processing. Some people at Microsoft made a nice design! By undergirding the installation with SQL tables. It lets WI have an inner coherent structure, into which third party applications can fit, in a disciplined way. Plus, it allows the panoply of SQL queries. At the right level, it is an elegant approach.

Decision Support Systems and Intelligent Systems (7th Edition)
Average customer rating:

Solid publication for DSS & IT Theory--Great research tool!

Rambling book

Purpose of the book: separate you from your money???

Excellent reference, thick college text

throw it into the trash

Decision Support Systems and Intelligent Systems (7th Edition)
Efraim Turban , Jay E. Aronson , and Ting-Peng Liang
Manufacturer: Prentice Hall
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Healthcare Finance: Basic Tools for Non-Financial Managers (Health Care Finance (Baker))

Essentials of Health Care Finance

ASIN: 0130461067

Book Description

Widely hailed for its contemporary, cutting-edge perspective, this comprehensive, reader-friendly text covers the latest decision support theories and practices used by managers and organizations. Current examples and cases are drawn from actual organizations and firms. Decision Making, Systems, Modeling, and Support. Data Warehousing, Access, Analysis, Mining, and Visualization. Modeling and Analysis. Decision Support System Development. Collaborative Computing Technologies: Group Support Systems. Enterprise Decision Support Systems. Knowledge Management. Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems. Knowledge Acquisition and Validation. Knowledge Representation. Inference Techniques. Intelligent Systems Development. Neural Computing Applications, and Advanced Artificial Intelligent Systems and Applications. Intelligent Software Agents and Creativity. Implementing and Integrating Management Support Systems. Organizational and Societal Impacts of Management Support Systems. For managers interested in Decision Support Systems, Computerized Decision Making, and Management Support Systems.

Customer Reviews:

Solid publication for DSS & IT Theory--Great research tool!.......2005-10-25

Not everyone will find this book as extremely useful as I did. The information contained within can be intimidating because of the sheer volume packed into its over 900 pages, but for someone wanting a foundation of Decision-support theory, this book should fulfill your need.

Each chapter provides an overview and a list of learning objectives that are adequately covered in greater detail. While theory lessons provide a necessary base for most students, this book successfully ties a "real-world" example to each chapter lesson that is not only relevant, but also includes associated links should the reader require more detail.

The book layout is fairly consistent with the more recent IT textbook publications that provide information with a short shelf-life (technological improvements being what they are today), but the illustrated concepts should be useful until the next revision is published.

The authors provide a wealth of references that are extremely useful for anyone interested in expanding their knowledge on any particular section or detail in the book. This provides a necessary trail for any research project.

The companion website (publisher) provides power point presentations that outline each chapter that were found useful for classroom utilization, however, a few details such as adding notes pages would have been greatly appreciated. Essentially, the material covered by these presentations proved more than adequate, although sometimes requiring a little digging in the textbook to provide enough detail (which I believe was the intent).

All in all this was an excellent book and a great research tool for anyone pursuing an education in IT.

Rambling book.......2005-10-18

This book could get away with about 2/3 the volume of content still be interesting. There really does not seem to be any structure to the way a chapter flows. Its easy to skim, but difficult to read.

Good case studies;
The connection with the web is a little over-emphasized and sometimes unclear. I'd prefer a dense read, with some concise messages.

This is a good course text, not a favorite though.

Purpose of the book: separate you from your money???.......2005-09-21

As far as I can tell the prupose of this book is to separate you from a great deal of your money!

It has a great deal to say about nothing. There is very little substantive detail on anything! Which, given it's size, really is quite amazing! This book will not teach you how to concretely implement any decision support system. It waffles on at a very distant level about such systems but never gets down in the trenches, if you know what I mean. It's basically why (though only just) rather than how! And for me, that makes this book a very pricey door jam.

Seriously, I was really underwhelmed and disappointed by the book. I ended up buying Statistics, Data Analysis and Decision Modeling by Evens and Olson (isbn: 0130783838) to find the information and practice that I need (decision modeling rather than decision support systems per se). It also comes with phstat software which is a VERY useful excel statistical add-in.

For example, from this book, p681-685 is genetic algorithms -> in 5 Pages!!!!! with nothing substantive about recombination, crossover, mutation, fitness or anythign like that (the terms are mentioned but not explained)...all it does is refer you sompleace else! Fuzzy logic gets 4 pages...with no implementation details. That is seriously ordinary!

So I suggest you save your money and look at something else. SOmehow I don't see this book giving anybody too much joy. It amazes me it has lasted through 7 edition. If the 7th is this bad...I'd hate to see the first edition!!! So, as I said before, more a book about why and where to go to get knowledge of how to do rather than giving you the know-how. SO look for a book on how! This is a book for discovering that terms like knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) actually exist...and maybe what it means (like say webopedia) but certainly not how to do it...

Excellent reference, thick college text.......2005-02-07

This is a textbook appropriate for a college-level course at the upper division or graduate level. It gives very thorough coverage of the entire field in one book, and most students really like the book in satisfaction questionnaires, but some feel overwhelmed until after the material is covered in class. I focus on specific chapters or sections of chapters for a single-semester course.

It is an excellent reference for key elements of DSS and related systems. I've followed it through several editions, and when new chapters are introduced, they may be verbose--but they are more focused in later editions. The authors do a good job of describing how computer-based systems support structured, semi-structured, and unstructured decisions and the design, intelligence, and choice framework. The book also has several good general chapters that provide an overview and describe different types of decision support systems. It includes sections on object-oriented systems and knowledge management (KM) systems. It is pretty theoretical and covers a lot of material, yet it's my favorite text for its purpose.

throw it into the trash.......2004-07-19

Used it for school, found it dry, boring, ugly. I got frustrated every time I picked up the book. Really want to throw it into the trash if not for the resell value.

DRG Expert 2007: A Comprehensive Guidebook to the DRG Classification System (Drg Expert)

Average customer rating:

DRG Expert 2007: A Comprehensive Guidebook to the DRG Classification System (Drg Expert)

Manufacturer: Elsevier Health Sciences
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 1563379058

Experts' Guide to OS/400 & i5/OS Security

Average customer rating:

The Ultimate OS/400 Security Guide

Experts' Guide to OS/400 & i5/OS Security
Carol Woodbury , and Patrick Botz
Manufacturer: 29th Street Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Hacking iSeries
IBM i5/iSeries Primer: Concepts and Techniques for Programmers, Administrators, and System Operators
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Starter Kit for the IBM iSeries and AS/400

ASIN: 158304096X

Book Description

This comprehensive Guide to OS/400 and i5/0S security is your one-stop resource for securing the information assets of your business. Written by two of the industry's most knowledgeable security experts, Carol Woodbury and IBM's Patrick Botz, this book is your ticket to a secure enterprise.

You'll learn the A-Z of OS/400 security, including important new features available in OS/400 Version 5 Release 2 plus a complete rundown on the security enhancements in IBM's "next generation" of OS/400: i5/OS V5R3. You'll find detailed descriptions of system values, user profiles, object authorization, and more. Special chapters address several critical areas of OS/400 security: writing a security policy, service tools security, securing the IFS, Internet security, and OS/400-i5/OS single sign-on.

"Experts' Guide to OS/400 & i5/OS Security" continues the tradition of the bestselling "Implementing AS/400 Security" in providing practical, easy-to-understand explanations of security concepts and features. Numerous checklists, worksheets, and sample programs help you put the concepts to work to protect your system and your business. Throughout the book, you'll also see specific Security Recommendations that point out recommended settings, values, and procedures to help you implement the features described in the chapters.

No OS/400 or i5/OS security administrator should be without a copy of "Experts Guide to OS/400 & i5/OS Security!"

Customer Reviews:

The Ultimate OS/400 Security Guide.......2005-03-10

This is quite simply the definitive work todate on securing your iSeries computer system. This book addresses key business security problems and provides not only the technical data but the rationale behind alternative implementations.

I have recently been reviewing our company's security implementation in light of Sarbanes Oxley. This book has helped has been a tremendous help. This book explains what actually happens when you select a security option.

I also like the writing style of this book. It doesn't matter whether you are an iSeries expert or novice, the advice and recommendations will enable anyone to secure their system and meet their unique requirements.

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)

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how to reason about knowledge
Don't have to be a math buff to understand
This book is an Eye-Opener!

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence) (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Artificial Intelligence)
Ronald Brachman , and Hector Levesque
Manufacturer: Morgan Kaufmann
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Ontological Engineering: with examples from the areas of Knowledge Management, e-Commerce and the Semantic Web. First Edition (Advanced Information and Knowledge Processing)
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ASIN: 1558609326

Book Description

Knowledge representation is at the very core of a radical idea for understanding intelligence. Instead of trying to understand or build brains from the bottom up, its goal is to understand and build intelligent behavior from the top down, putting the focus on what an agent needs to know in order to behave intelligently, how this knowledge can be represented symbolically, and how automated reasoning procedures can make this knowledge available as needed.

This landmark text takes the central concepts of knowledge representation developed over the last 50 years and illustrates them in a lucid and compelling way. Each of the various styles of representation is presented in a simple and intuitive form, and the basics of reasoning with that representation are explained in detail. This approach gives readers a solid foundation for understanding the more advanced work found in the research literature. The presentation is clear enough to be accessible to a broad audience, including researchers and practitioners in database management, information retrieval, and object-oriented systems as well as artificial intelligence. This book provides the foundation in knowledge representation and reasoning that every AI practitioner needs.

*Authors are well-recognized experts in the field who have applied the techniques to real-world problems
* Presents the core ideas of KR&R in a simple straight forward approach, independent of the quirks of research systems
*Offers the first true synthesis of the field in over a decade

Customer Reviews:

how to reason about knowledge.......2006-03-13

Brachman and Levesque describe what may be considered the foundations of artificial intelligence. They look at how to represent knowledge. As far more than just a passive collection of facts. The "Reasoning" in the book's title is the important aspect of that representation. You can understand how to apply reasoning in a logical and systematic manner.

Those of you from a computing background may also find similarities between the discussion of object oriented representations and various OO programming languages. You might actually key off these similarities by using the text to guide your KR coding.

Don't have to be a math buff to understand.......2005-06-24

I came across this book looking for a text that would explain the context of First Order Logic, why it is used for so many knowledge representation problems, how it is used to solve them, and its limitations. I must say that this is far and away the best book I've found to answer these questions. If you search around a little at the competition, you will find much of the text quickly turning to mathematical proofs and deductions in their explanations. While this is of course necessary and helpful, it doesn't (for me) really give an idea of how and why these methods are used practically. You can tell that these authors spent some time on ensuring consistency and fluency of the writing, which I find so very helpful.

I'm trying to think of something bad to say about it: I wish it were longer! If you read the preface you will see the authors call it an introduction, which is definitely true. Maybe they will team up again for a more in-depth text on some aspect of this subject.

This book is an Eye-Opener!.......2004-11-25

I love this book- It is a comprehensive introduction into knowledge representation, with enough detail to create your own knowledge representation programs.

Are you a programmer who wonders what it really means when an object *IS* another object, in the form of inheritance found in object-oriented systems? Ever confused by the nuances of multiple inheritance? Ever wonder what XML or OOP or Relational Databases have to do with each other? Ever wonder if all those A.I. programmers in the 70s actually created anything useful? Ever wonder how type systems work? Ever wonder how to store complicated and vague data into a database?

This book doesn't really have answers to these questions (nobody really does, in my opinion) but learning the information in this book is the first step you'll want to take to get closer to some answers...

It basically covers 3 main topics: FOL (traditional logic like you probably learned in college) Frames (sort of the grandaddy of OOP) and Description Logics (a really powerful synthesis of object-thinking with strict logical fundamentals)

This book has a bit of hairy mathematical notation in it, so if your not comfortable talking about things like "an object x that is an element in the domain" some of the chapters will require a bit of effort on your part. The authors are careful, however, to follow every difficult mathematical analysis with some concrete examples that ease the learning process- I often wish examples were more frequent in other theoretical tombs like this. Any computer programmer can process this text with a bit of moderate effort.

I couldn't imagine being a professional programmer and not knowing the information in this book now that I have read it. Although the topics in this book are somewhat obscure today, I think they will receive far greater appreciation in the future- especially among medical software developers. Here's your chance to be ahead of the curve in the field of knowledge representation!

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes

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Information theory, the third physics revolution of the XXth century
Very Well Rounded
Basic information
covers the science of information theory
Information Theory, Entropy, and Shannon

Decoding the Universe: How the New Science of Information Is Explaining Everything in the Cosmos, from Our Brains to Black Holes
Charles Seife
Manufacturer: Viking Adult
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: B000NBKIXU

Book Description

As Charles Seife reveals in this energetic new book, information theory, once the province of philosophers and linguists, has emerged as the crucial science of our time, shedding new light on the mysteries of physics, the nature of space and time and the creation and destruction of the universe itself.

With his gift for making cutting-edge science accessible and entertaining, Seife explains how theorists came to understand that information is not a construct of the mind but a fundamental element of the physical world, something that sits inside every living cell and surrounds every black hole in the cosmos. It exists, like energy, even if there is no life to observe it. Starting with the breaking of the Enigma code during World War II and building momentum with the computer revolution, information theory has taken its place at the forefront of theoretical physics as scientists begin to use it to reconcile the paradoxes of relativity and quantum mechanics that have puzzled theorists since Einstein. Lucid and exhilarating, Decoding the Universe probes the mind-boggling advances that are taking us to the brink of a new understanding of the universe.

Customer Reviews:

Information theory, the third physics revolution of the XXth century.......2007-10-03

The author has a degree in probability theory and artificial intelligence, but he is a professor of journalism and has therefore written a book which is both very entertaining and not too difficult to understand. The subject is information, which Seife claims is the third XXth century revolution in physics started by Claude Shannon and which has relations with the other two: Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.

Of course, information is also related to thermodynamics and entropy, so the book contains a discussion of all these topics: thermodynamics, relativity and quantum mechanics. Famous conundrums such as Schroedinger's cat, entanglement, Maxwell's demon, etc. are analyzed from the point of view of information theory.

Here are some snippets of the book:

According to Seife, Einstein dictum "Nothing can travel faster than light" is really about information:" Information speed cannot exceed c". Another interesting fact is that what really causes computers to heat is the erasure of bits.

Seife describes recent achievements and experiments, proof that he is familiar with the latest results. One curious example is the solution of "the knight problem" in 2000 by using a DNA computer! Another one is that the entire human race has less genetic diversity than a few scores of chimps due to some kind of cataclysm about 500,000 years ago. A third one is the 1996 experiment demonstrating the existence of virtual particles (the so called Casimir effect).

In chapter 7, quantum computers are introduced and the possibility of the brain being one is briefly discussed. Unfortunately, it seems that Max Tegmark proved Roger Penrose wrong on this count. You begin to understand the power of quantum computation when the author describes Grover's algorithm to guess a number out of 16. Classically you need four yes/no answers to four questions. Grover manages the same task with two. Quantum computation reduces the complexity of some problems from n to square root of n.

I found also very interesting the reasons why the photoelectric effect cannot be explained by waves. On the other hand, interference cannot be explained by a corpuscular theory of light, so we are stuck with duality.

Towards the end, the author discusses black holes and the holographic principle: the quantity of information contained in a ball is not limited by its volume (surprisingly), but by its area. Since most cosmologists consider now the universe infinite (inflation seems to imply this) we are led, via the holographic bound, to the conclusion that the universe contains infinite copies of our own bubble universe. Seife admits that this is the most bizarre thing among the many ones described in his book.

Very Well Rounded.......2007-09-20

I have a Ph.D. in Physics and therefore know many well educated scientists, but very few have a functional concept of Information as a physical science. Begun with, mostly, Claude Shannon, this topic of study has been growing into a real science for decades now, but for some reason it is one of the most misunderstood subjects out there, even for seasoned professional scientists. Seife cuts to the heart of the matter with very clear thinking and examples from a very well rounded range of scientific points of view. Seife clearly and very engagingly demystifies many confusing topics and brings a real and almost visceral familiarity to a complex subject. After reading this, you will understand many esoteric scientific concepts better than even some professionals... and enjoy it immensely!

Basic information.......2007-08-02

This book is easy to read and is well written, but does not have much depth. The author has proven to be able to explain clearly complex ideas, but seems to lack enough background for some of the fields that the book explores. E.g., the enthusiasm with which the author explains that in an infinite universe there are many (infinite) worlds like ours seems annoying, and has little if anything to do with information or the holographic principle. It is a quite trivial idea valid for many cosmological theories.

Anyway, you can have a good time reading it, and if you are not an expert in information theory, you can find here good explanations of some basic concepts.

covers the science of information theory.......2007-07-21

This book is about information theory. The first few chapters describe information theory and then these theories are applied to biology and physics. I thought the introduction to information theory was well done, I came away with enough knowledge to follow the rest of the book. The chapter on biology, called Life, was interesting but I thought the best part of the book was the physics part. The author talks at length about Boltzman's statistical physics in a very comprehensible manner. He also explains how, although some experiments have allowed parts of light waves to travel faster than light, you can't send information over those parts of light waves so in effect you still can't travel faster than light. The author states that, from information theories perspective, you can't send information faster than light and that this law has not even been bent. Even the "spooky action at a distance" of superposition of atomic spin, which has to do with quantum mechanics, does not allow transferal of information at speeds faster than light. After reading this book my knowledge of the central concepts of information theory and statistical mechanics was greatly expanded. I even made some headway into the concepts of quantum mechanics. I highly recommend this book for those people looking looking for information about the above topics.

Information Theory, Entropy, and Shannon.......2007-07-06

1. Boltzmann, wrote S=k log W , the first law of thermodynamics deals with explaining heat, work, and energy.
2. The industrial revolution needed more powerful engines. The steam engine stars with a fire that cause water to boil into steam, which takes up more room than the equivalent water-it expands. The expansion of steam does work; it moves a piston which, in turn, can move a wheel or lift a rock or pump water. The steam then either flies away into the sky or moves into a cool chamber exposed to air and then condenses, flowing back toward the fire to begin the cycle again. The steam engine sits between high temperature object (fire) and a cold-temperature object(the air). The system will tend toward equilibrium. In allowing the heat to flow, the engine extracts some of the energy and perform useful work. Work and heat are always ways of transferring energy.
3. Carnot put a super engine flowing heat from the hot resevoir to the cold. While allowing the same amount of heat, Q, to flow the cold reservior through a heat pump back into the hot reservoir. Some of the work from the super engine can be diverted to the heat pump. "All, told no, net heat flows from the cold reservoir to the hot reservoir". A perpetual motion machine. "But nothing comes for free. It's the law." "Energy can not be created or destroyed. Energy is conserved." The second law of equilibrium states that anytime you do work, you are irreversibly increasing the equilibriumness of the universe." The second law explains why there does not exist a super engine. "Entropy always increases". "Entropy captures the configuration of the entire collection of matter in terms of probabilities-in terms of the most probable configurations of a collection of atoms, or, in our box-and marble example, the most likely outcomes wen we dump marbles in a box. The higher the probablity of a configuration of mater, the higher the entropy of that configuration."
4. "Some of themost fundamental rules in physics, the laws of thermodynamics, for example, andthe laws that tell how collections of atoms move in a chunk of matter-are deep down, actually laws about information." Shannons helped translate differential equations into a form the computer could understand and creating designs of electrical relays and flip-flo switches. Shannon created boolean logic using mathematics of manipulating 0s and 1s. Shannon uses 0s and 1s to measure the mass flow of information; he included compression algorithms into the model by exploiting redundancy in a given message. A question with N possible outcomes would need log N bits of information to distinquish between the information. Informtion encoded in 1s and 0s cand answer any question, so long as that question has a finite answer. Written language is a stream of finite symbols. Each symbol can be represented as a stream of bits. Bits are the universal medium of information. Five bits can be compressed into a one or two bits through a mapping rule. The rules make the string redundant. Shannon creates his channel capacity theorem to explain how much stuff can be sent over communication lines. "Information is intimately related to entropy and energy. The function Shannon derived was, roughly speaking, a measure of how unpredictable a string of bits is. the less predictable it is, the less able you are to generate the entire message from a smaller string of bits-in other words, the less redundant. The less redundancy a message has, the more information it can contain, so by measuring this unpredictability, Shannon hoped to be able to get at the information stored in the message." In the marbles in the box, the distribution of half the marbles on both the left and right side had the highest entropy and the distribution with all the marbles on either the left or right side had the lowest entropy. The entropy distribution of 1s ands 0s of symbols directly relates to the amount of information of the stream.
5. Shannon figured out how much energy was required to transmit a bit from place to place under certain conditions. Information theory is the science of manipulation and transmission of bits, is very closely tied to thermodynamics. Maxwell's entropy problem could use information theory instead thermodynamics to separate the hot atoms from the cold atoms. Information does not come free, it requires energy. Szilard calculated that kT log 2 joules for every bit of information. Using that useful energy increases the entropy of the box. The process of obtaining and acting on the information increases the entropy of the universe. The opening and closing of the shutter was based on the information and decreases the entropy. Shannon information entropy and thermal entropy are related. Once the energy is stopped the box returns to equilibrium. A turning machine could acts as the controller for the shutter, opening and closing.
6. Memory reusablity requires energy and increases entropy. "Bits can be added without consuming energy or increasing the energy of the universe. You can multiple bits. You can negate them. But one action in a computer generates heat, which when dissipated into the environment, increases the entropy in the universe. That action is erasing a bit."

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