Multimedia Communications

Rating:
Summary: Beware, looks nice but strange errors abound
Review: After seing the previous reviews giving full marks to this title I felt compelled to make some remarks. The book does cover a great deal of material and should be very useful. However, besides the usaual typos and stuff there are several passages in this book that are really bad since they are nowhere near a correct description of the topic. For example sections 3.3.4 and 3.3.5 on LZ and LZW coding. Totally mixed up... (They dont even mention that there are TWO very different LZ algorithms ie LZ77 and LZ78, they just describe some strange mixture of them without any foundation in reality...). Same thing on pg 883-884 with regards to recursive and iterative name resolution. Wrong, plain and simple. Compare their description to any DataComm textbook and you'll see. However these parts are written informatively and with figures and examples making it all very believable. And this is the big problem for me. How can I be sure that other parts of the book, which cover material I am not so familiar with, does not contain more of this false and erroneous descriptions....

Rating:
Summary: Superb book on Multimedia!
Review: I have got this book along with quite a few more on Multimedia. I am VERY happy with this title, I can easily select it as the bext text available to date. The book is quite complete and brings a good number of exercises. The companion web-site allows one to get material which makes it easier to prepare a course based on this title. I have very sucessfully adopted this book on a pos-graduated course on Multimedia Systems (with the aid of additional material as well).

I would recommend Addison Wesley to make this book more broadly available though (I ordered my copy from Amazon.com but for some students it is desirable to find it in local bookstores too).

Rating:
Summary: Wow, every protocol in one place
Review: This is a very impressive reference.

Sparing you the excessive application information, it provides the logic and call flow of numerous protocols. It contained every protocol I could think of, and then some. If you are engineering or testing/certifying anything from an ATM network, Voice over IP telephone system, Distributed Mail System or Unified Messaging System to a Packet over Sonet or GigE Infrastructure with streaming multimedia, from transmission systems to routing protocols and switch logic, this is the book for you.

This reference book easily gets 5 stars, and replaces several other books with one concise and detailed volume.

Hats off to you Fred, you did an outstanding job!