How to do Everything with Podcasting by Shel Holtz and Neville Hobsen
This is a great beginners book on this subject. Have you ever wanted to put your own radio show together? That's basically what podcasting is, making your own radio show for the Internet. This book will walk you through the steps needed to do just that. You'll learn the basics on planning, recording, editing, and releasing that program on the Internet. The authors walk you through hardware and software selection too. This aspect of the book may be somewhat dated but it still has value. They also deal with advertising on your podcast. If you've never had any experience putting radio programs together but you're planning on getting into podcasting, this is one of the books you should add to your library.
Blog Wild! by Andy Wibbels
This book is an excellent quick guide to getting into blogging for your business. If you are thinking about doing it, take a look at this book. For those who know nothing it is an excellent place to start.
Shrouds of Glory by Winston Groom
If you are looking for an interesting and riveting book that will hold your attention from the first page to the last, this is it. It tells the tale of Confederate General John Bell Hood and the Army of Tennessee as they moved North after the Battle of Atlanta to outskirts of Nashville that ended the South's last great offensive. Groom tells the tale with energy and excitement that turns this mixture of eyewitness accounts, journal entries, and military documents into a barn burner you won't want to put down. This book gets my whole hearted recommendation.
Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow
I read this again recently to determine how much better the new edition was that the first. While I wasn't overly impressed with it being better, this title, no matter the edition, is still one of the best titles out there on this topic. It's too bad that not enough people who call themselves Web designers and developers take the time to read this book. It's also a shame that people at Microsoft, Adobe, and the other IDE development companies don't spend enough time reading it. This is a book that we, designers and developers, all should have in our library and read every couple of months to remind ourselves of how a site should be put together, not just for findability but for useability also. The only downside of the whole book is that it plays best to the worst users of the Internet, advertisers and hucksters. Oh well, buy the book anyway.
Web Site Design for Professional Photographers by Paul Brooks Rose & Jean Holland-Rose
I have been designing, building, and developing Web sites since the early 1990's. I've even written a couple of books about creating your own Web site. So you ask why did I purchase this book? The answer lies in my returning interest in photography over the past year. I wanted to know how best to display my photographic works via a Web site.
The cover should have told me that this book wasn't worth the thirty dollar asking price. Right there on the cover it stated "Step-by-step techniques for designing and maintaining a successful Web site." I think some idiot intern wrote something similar to that for the cover of one of my books back in the '90's. That book was a best seller too. (I wonder if that intern has now gotten a promotion and works for Amherst Media?)
Anyway, back to the book. The book is only 126 pages long. That's just under 24 cents a page. What a deal!
The book is relatively recent being published in 2003 so the material should be more up-to-date than any of my books from the mid-90's even if it's not cutting edge. So although Dreamweaver is mentioned, the tool of choice for these two authors is FrontPage. Hey, that's cool. I wrote one of the first books about FrontPage. Started writing the book before Microsoft even bought the product. Problem is they don't make it any more. Yes, I know in 2003 FrontPage was still being made. And some people were using it. But why do you think Microsoft quit making it? Because few professional Web developers would touch it by then. The people that were still using FrontPage were pointed at another even simpler product. The professionals were given new products to compete with Dreamweaver. And this book is supposed to be for professionals, isn't it.
But back to the book itself. The authors apparently make a living creating sites for photographers. That's what their bio states. The first chapter, however, talks about doing your own site to save money. Do you see the problem with the logic here?
But wait. I'm doing what I say shouldn't be done. I critiquing the book for what it's not. The authors and publishers say the book is aimed at professional photographers but I can't accept even that. The authors act like the reader has never been around Photoshop. I think this book is at best something maybe a beginner might want to look at and even there I'm not so sure. Even the downloadable site templates are amateurish.
I didn't like this book at all. It was hard to find anything positive about the book. The publisher should be ashamed of themselves.
Housekeeping
Today I am beginning the process of moving all of my reviews from the Summitt New Media site to my personal site. This message is being posted to both. The Summitt New Media site is the home of Summitt New Media, LLC and should reflect the operations of that business, the design, development, and maintenance of Web, desktop, and database applications for business. As a result, all references having to do with my writing are being moved to paulsummitt.com where my academic, fiction, and music writing have been for quite some time. I moved all references to my genealogy studies to The Summitt Family Quarterly some time ago. I'll also be moving the Summitt New Media Bookstore to another location soon also. I will make every effort to link to the new sites from the current locations so that anyone looking for this material will still be able to find it. I hope you understand my reasoning for these moves and will continue to visit my sites to find out what I'm doing and what I think.
thanks
paul
Game Design: Secrets of the Sages 2nd Edition edited by Marc Saltzman
Sorry to say but I was very disappointed with this book. I was expecting more explanation of game design with perhaps some structure and examples. What I got was short slices of interviews with people in the game design business. I knew several of these people and their work, some of which I was not impressed by at all. I'm a gamer from the old board and pieces style and many of the computer games by these people that I have purchased were based on board games I have played. I must say that in my opinion the computer game versions were butchered.
This type of thing might just be your cup of tea but it is not mine. Not only does it not go in my keep on my desk book group, it doesn't even make the not great but keep in my collection group. If you are looking for an inexpensive, well-read copy of this book, check out our bookstore. I'm going to put it up for sale real reasonable shortly after I finish this review.
The Matrix and Philosophy (Edited by William Irwin)
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real!"
At times while reading this book I thought to myself that these people have way too much time on their hands. Several times the various authors refer to
The Matrix as being "the most philisophical film ever made." I bet these people believed Paul was dead while they sat around playing the Beatles record backwards in their college days. And if they didn't because they were too young, they would have if they had known who the Beatles were. I really had to reminding myself that these were "professional philosophers."
Several of them seemed astounded by the similarities between the plot of the Matrix and the story of the cave in Plato's
Republic. They would probably be stunned to learn of the similarities between Shakespeare's
Romeo and Juliet and
West Side Story. These people really need to read more rather than sitting on their duffs in academia while pontificating to each other on the number of angels that can sit on the head of a needle.
Probably the worst chapter was that written by feminist Cynthia Freeland. It seems she really dislikes Keanu Reeves. She constantly compares the blockbuster
The Matrix to a little known basicly cult film titled
eXistenZ. Yes, there is a stronger female character in
eXistenZ. I won't argue that at all. We're both in agreement. I've seen both films and found both interesting, but one made a lot more money than the other and I'll give you three guesses which one and the first two guesses don'tr count.
I'm pretty sure that it is not so much her comments and comparisons but rather the manner in which she presents it. Her constant feminist harping frankly just irked me and damaged that part of her message that was important. There's really no question about why one film outperformed the other. The film was written by young white males for young white males and their dates. Like it or not, these people have the money to go to the movie theater several times a month and sustain Hollywood. Most of them barely read. You want people to like films like
eXistenZ more than
The Matrix? Get more readers into the film industry, doesn't matter if they're male or female as long as they read.
My favorite chapters are probably the last two on postmodernism and marxism. Being somewhat of a postmodernist myself, I found the viewpoints in that chapter considerably in agreement with my own views on the film. Of course, as such, I had never thought about
The Matrix from a Marxist perspective before and it was extremely enjoyable to read and enlightening.
Overall, I would recommend this book to anyone who would like to look at something such as this film from a varity of other viewpoints. Whether you agree with those viewpoints or not, being exposed to those viewpoints will make you a better person. Then again, most of you are just going to go to a movie.
