The African American Child: Development and Challenges Review

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The African American Child: Development and Challenges Review"Harris and Graham review available research about African American children in the areas of health, the family, education, language and literacy, and moral and social development, and also indicate some limitations of these inquiries. They provide a model of appropriate research design, examining general problems of research, before turning their attention to the specifics of African American children. As a context for their broader discussion of development, they present various psychological theories and note how these have or have not addressed the needs of black children. Subsequent chapters provide overviews/discussions of particular issues and summaries with appropriate bibliographic references. Although African American children have been discussed in numerous educational and sociological books, the focus has usually been on the problematic nature of the children's experience--i.e., on deficits rather than differences. This book argues convincingly that children's cultural differences need to be recognized for any accurate understanding of their development. Pointing out the need for additional and more effectively designed research, Harris and Graham provide a valuable foundation for further investigations. This nonpolemic book should be in all libraries, filling an unfortunate gap. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals."
-- 11/07 issue of CHOICE. (CHOICE is a monthly magazine targeted primarily to librarians. Their short reviews are one of the most important collection development tools.)
"This excellent book...should be required reading for individuals working with African American children and their families ( and students who will be)."
--Doody's Review Service
From the book cover:
"This book does a wonderful job of providing a comprehensive, up-to-date portrayal of research, thinking, and issues related to the African American child. The books special contribution is to cover what specifically is known about the African American child on a wide range of topics in the field of child development (from various social contexts to language and literacy). I know of no other book that does this so effectively."
--John W. Santrock, PhD, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas at Dallas
"This carefully researched, clearly written, highly current text offers for the first time a holistic view of the development and life conditions of African-American children. Among its exemplary features are a rich picture of African-American childrens past and contemporary experiences and many highly informative, well-reasoned discussions of pressing social issues relevant to African-American childrens adjustment - including school desegregation, racial identity, black language dialects, community violence, and health care. The African American Child is an invaluable resource for scholars, policy makers, educators, and students of culture and child development. Bravo to the authors for greatly clarifying the steps that we - as individuals, as communities, and as a society - must take to promote African-American children's well-being."
--Laura E. Berk, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Illinois State University
The African American Child: Development and Challenges Overview"This nonpolemic book should be in all libraries. Highly recommended."-- Choice
This textbook introduces students to the socioeconomic, educational, and health-related issues impacting the lives of African American children, but have been typically ignored in mainstream textbooks. The book is designed to be student friendly, as each chapter presents an "Insider's Voice," a narrative about the issues discussed. The chapters feature dialogues of current biological, environmental, and cultural theories, as well as suggestions for additional videos and websites to guide critical thinking.


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Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns Review

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Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns Review"Patterns-Based Engineering is a big thick hardcover book with three parts. The audience is mainly architects/designers with OO, UML and patterns experience. The reader should also be comfortable dealing with abstract thought.
I had different reactions to each part so reviewing separately:
Part 1
The parts on how to generalize and look for patterns in what we do was interesting. It was approachable and I found myself scribbling in the margins.
Part 1a
There was a case study to walk you through how patterns based engineering works in practice. This was the least abstract part of the book, but it had one major problem - too much exposition on the dev team along with their names. Two pages later I was already backflipping to recall who these people are and by the next day/chapter I had no idea. Felt like I was missing something important.
Part 2
The patterns themselves are very reference like and dry. Nothing wrong with it, but didn't hold my attention. Maybe they aren't meant to be read straight through.
Part 3
I was back to being engaged and writing in the margins for the costs and benefits chapters. I think the misconceptions chapter could have been fleshed out more. Parts of it read like "X is a myth because X is not true" and could have used more examples.
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Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for writing this review on behalf of CodeRanch.Patterns-Based Engineering: Successfully Delivering Solutions via Patterns OverviewSuccessfully delivering Solutions via Patterns In Patterns-Based Engineering, two leading experts bring together true best practices for developing and deploying successful software-intensive systems. Drawing on their extensive enterprise development experience, the authors clearly show how to deliver on the promise of a patterns-based approach—and consistently create higher-quality solutions faster, with fewer resources.Lee Ackerman and Celso Gonzalez demonstrate how Patterns-Based Engineering (PBE) can help you systematically overcome common obstacles to success with patterns. By bringing discipline and clarity to patterns usage, their techniques enable you to replicate your success broadly and scale patterns to even the largest projects.The authors introduce powerful ways to discover, design, create, package, and consume patterns based on your organization's experience and best practices. They also present extensive coverage of the nontechnical aspects of making patterns work, including a full chapter of guidance on clearing up misconceptions that stand in your way. Coverage includesUsing patterns to optimize the entire development lifecycle, including design, coding, testing, and deployment Systematically managing the risks and economic returns associated with patterns Effectively implementing PBE roles, tasks, work products, and tools Integrating PBE with existing development processes, including eXtreme Programming, Scrum, and OpenUP Using Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) with patternsWhether you're an architect, designer, developer, analyst, project manager, or process engineer, Patterns-Based Engineering will help you to consistently derive greater business value and agility from patterns.

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Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) Review

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Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) ReviewThe introduction to this book mentions its broken up history, being picked up and abandoned a couple times. It definitely shows in the writing, which is unfocused, choppy, and repetitive. Most of the first half is taken up with repetitive descriptions of the general software testing process. The second half contains a summary of one author's thesis on using evolutionary algorithms for fuzzing and the final author's use of various fuzzing tools to try to find hand-inserted vulnerabilities. While the latter half is better than the first, each topic is worthy of a single blog post. Given this book's price and the authors' reputations, I expected more.
At the same time, I read "Gray Hat Python" and it was enjoyable. Even though it had a much broader focus on other topics, it contained more hands-on info on fuzzing tools. I'm also interested in "Fuzzing: Brute Force Vulnerability Discovery", although I have not read it yet.
Don't waste your time on this book. Download the Sulley manual, read the slides from a few Blackhat talks, and you'll be at the state of the art for current fuzzing knowledge.Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance (Artech House Information Security and Privacy) Overview"Fuzzing for Software Security Testing and Quality Assurance" gives software developers a powerful new tool to build secure, high-quality software, and takes a weapon from the malicious hackers' arsenal. This practical resource helps developers think like a software cracker, so they can find and patch flaws in software before harmful viruses, worms, and Trojans can use these vulnerabilities to rampage systems. Traditional software programmers and testers learn how to make fuzzing a standard practice that integrates seamlessly with all development activities. The book progresses through each phase of software development and points out where testing and auditing can tighten security. It surveys all popular commercial fuzzing tools and explains how to select the right one for a software development project. The book also covers those cases where commercial tools fall short and developers need to build their own custom fuzzing tools.

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Vygotsky at Work and Play Review

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Vygotsky at Work and Play ReviewEvery now and then you get lucky, and find the book that is just the book you need at that point in your career to take the next step forward. (I used "book" in this opening sentence, but the same could be said for "article" or "presentation," but here we are concerned with books.) Lois Holzman's Vygotsky at Work and Play is just that sort of book. Up until reading it, I had been unaware of Lois Holzman's work, and this book is a great introduction. It is a kind of intellectual autobiography, a conceptual reflection on her several decades of good work. The book is short, well-written, and a great lead-in to the work Holzman has done, mostly in partnership with Fred Newman. Their work is both multifaceted and highly innovative, and it challenges some traditional conceptions about how science is done. Their work is multifaceted because they have made significant contributions to therapy (social therapy), schooling, out-of-school (youth) programs, and the workplace (organizations). The same conceptual principles underly all of this work, which derive mainly from Vygotsky and Wittgenstein. Their work is innovative for a number of reasons, not the least of which is their methodology. Part of their innovation is their (re)conceptualization of Vygotsky's "Zone of Proximal Development," and another part is their emphasis on performance, both as a product and a process of development in context. This is a book worth reading.Vygotsky at Work and Play OverviewVygotsky at Work and Play relates the discoveries and insights of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky to ordinary people and their communities. The author-working with her intellectual partner Fred Newman-has advanced a unique performance-based methodology of development and learning that draws upon a fresh and in some ways unconventional reading of Vygotsky. In this book, Holzman shows this methodology at work in key learning environments: psychotherapy, classrooms, out-of-school youth programs, and the workplace. The book vividly describes Vygotskian-inspired programs involving thousands of people from a wide range of cultural backgrounds, ages and occupations. Interwoven in each chapter are discussions of Vygotsky's understandings of play, speaking, thinking, the zone of proximal development, the individual and the group. Holzman brings practice and theory together to provide a way forward for those who wish to liberate human development and learning from the confines of the social scientific paradigm, the institutional location of educational and psychological research, and the practices that derive from them.Vygotsky at Work and Play presents a challenge to the underlying distinctions and boundaries of psychology, most significantly to the presumption of a cognitive-emotive divide, the notion of fixed identity, the privileging of the individual over the group, and the instrumental nature of play and performance.The book is essential reading for researchers and professionals in educational and developmentalpsychology, psychotherapy, cultural historical activity, social science, performance studies and education.

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Design for Trustworthy Software: Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software Review

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Design for Trustworthy Software: Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software ReviewThis thoroughly researched book begins with an excellent summary of the state of software development methodologies. It provides a useful description of the important strategies, life-cycle models, and process improvement methodologies. The theme of the book comes from applying Taguchi Methods to software development. This approach to trustworthy software shifts effort "upstream" from testing to design: Build software right in the first place rather than waiting for a huge quality assurance department (or worse yet, customers) to find the bugs for you. Several chapters provide detail on how to apply these principles to large scale software systems.
The authors have pulled together material from an impressive set of resources into one, admittedly lengthy, book. The shear number of methodologies (including corresponding acronyms!) contained in this volume is staggering. The chapter endnotes document these sources and web references give many pointers for additional information. They also include several case studies written by practioners who have used the methodologies described in the book.Design for Trustworthy Software: Tools, Techniques, and Methodology of Developing Robust Software Overview ASQ 2007 CROSBY MEDAL WINNER!

An Integrated Technology for Delivering Better Software—Cheaper and Faster!

This book presents an integrated technology, Design for Trustworthy Software (DFTS), to address software quality issues upstream such that the goal of software quality becomes that of preventing bugs in implementation rather than finding and eliminating them during and after implementation. The thrust of the technology is that major quality deployments take place before a single line of code is written!

This customer-oriented integrated technology can help deliver breakthrough results in cost, quality, and delivery schedule thus meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The authors describe the principles behind the technology as well as their applications to actual software design problems. They present illustrative case studies covering various aspects of DFTS technology including CoSQ, AHP, TRIZ, FMEA, QFD, and Taguchi Methods and provide ample questions and exercises to test the readers understanding of the material in addition to detailed examples of the applications of the technology.

The book can be used to impart organization-wide learning including training for DFTS Black Belts and Master Black Belts. It helps you gain rapid mastery, so you can deploy DFTS Technology quickly and successfully.
Learn how to

• Plan, build, maintain, and improve your trustworthy software development system
• Adapt best practices of quality, leadership, learning, and management for the unique software development milieu
• Listen to the customer's voice, then guide user expectations to realizable, reliable software products
• Refocus on customer-centered issues such as reliability, dependability, availability, and upgradeability
• Encourage greater design creativity and innovation
• Validate, verify, test, evaluate, integrate, and maintain software for trustworthiness
• Analyze the financial impact of software quality
• Prepare your leadership and infrastructure for DFTS

Design for Trustworthy Software will help you improve quality whether you develop in-house, outsource, consult, or provide support. It offers breakthrough solutions for the entire spectrum of software and quality professionals—from developers to project leaders, chief software architects to customers.

The American Society for Quality (ASQ) is the world's leading authority on quality which provides a community that advances learning, quality improvement, and knowledge exchange to improve business results, and to create better workplaces and communities worldwide. The Crosby Medal is presented to the individual who has authored a distinguished book contributing significantly to the extension of the philosophy and application of the principles, methods, or techniques of quality management.


Bijay K. Jayaswal, CEO of Agilenty Consulting Group, has held senior executive positions and consulted on quality and strategy for 25 years. His expertise includes value engineering, process improvement, and product development. He has directed MBA and Advanced Management programs, and helped to introduce enterprise-wide reengineering and Six Sigma initiatives.

Dr. Peter C. Patton, Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group, is Professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas. He served as CIO of the University of Pennsylvania and CTO at Lawson Software, and has been involved with software development since 1955.


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The Audio Programming Book Review

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The Audio Programming Book ReviewAs a seasoned coder new to audio processing I give this book 5 big stars. It explains through numerous coding examples and projects all of the major aspects of coding for audio. It also provides cross-platform libraries you will find essential, as well as extra chapters not included in the book via the included DVD. I was able to synthesize my own sound waves, and even write my own wav file player within a week.
That said I would not recommended this book to someone who is unfamiliar with coding. The authors do try to give an introduction to c programming, however I found that the examples in this book would be very difficult for a new programmer to be able to follow, let alone compile, given that there are many libraries which must be linked etc. Personally though, I loved that upon opening the book for the first time I could flip through the pages gingerly and see tons and tons of straight c code. The theory is there, but more importantly so is it's practical application, and that's what makes this book awesome.The Audio Programming Book OverviewThis comprehensive handbook of mathematical and programming techniquesfor audio signal processing will be an essential reference for all computermusicians, computer scientists, engineers, and anyone interested in audio. Designedto be used by readers with varying levels of programming expertise, it not onlyprovides the foundations for music and audio development but also tackles issuesthat sometimes remain mysterious even to experienced software designers. Exercisesand copious examples (all cross-platform and based on free or open source software)make the book ideal for classroom use. Fifteen chapters and eight appendixes coversuch topics as programming basics for C and C++ (with music-oriented examples),audio programming basics and more advanced topics, spectral audio programming;programming Csound opcodes, and algorithmic synthesis and music programming.Appendixes cover topics in compiling, audio and MIDI, computing, and math. Anaccompanying DVD provides an additional 40 chapters, covering musical and audioprograms with micro-controllers, alternate MIDI controllers, video controllers,developing Apple Audio Unit plug-ins from Csound opcodes, and audio programming forthe iPhone.The sections and chapters of the book are arranged progressively andtopics can be followed from chapter to chapter and from section to section. At thesame time, each section can stand alone as a self-contained unit. Readers will findThe Audio Programming Book a trustworthy companion on their journey through makingmusic and programming audio on modern computers.

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Systems Analysis and Design Review

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Systems Analysis and Design ReviewPrice reflects quality. This book is superb for System Analyst and Designers (SAD), both beginner and advanced ones. It is very informative that can be used for both learning and reference purposes. The authors explain everything very clearly using the same case examples (CD Selection case) and exercises for every chapter, so it's very easy to understand and keep track as you move chapter by chapter. I used to screw up in SAD but as I started using this book, I learned much more and much better than before. Thanks to the authors for thier good job and my professor who recommended this book to the class. Highly recommended for anyone interested in SAD.Systems Analysis and Design OverviewThe 4th edition of Systems Analysis and Design continues to offer a hands-on approach to SA&D while focusing on the core set of skills that all analysts must possess.
Building on their experience as professional systems analysts and award-winning teachers, authors Dennis, Wixom, and Roth capture the experience of developing and analyzing systems in a way that students can understand and apply.
With Systems Analysis and Design, 4th edition, students will leave the course with experience that is a rich foundation for further work as a systems analyst.

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Software Estimation Best Practices, Tools & Techniques: A Complete Guide for Software Project Estimators Review

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Software Estimation Best Practices, Tools & Techniques: A Complete Guide for Software Project Estimators ReviewMurali Chemuturi has written an excellent book that provides a nice overview of both the philosophy and practices of software estimation. In it, he covers the theories and practical realities of estimating software development projects in a simple to read, and easy to understand writing style. Software Estimation provides an excellent summary of various methods of software sizing and covers the pros & cons of each, including an excellent primer on Function Point Analysis. It also includes a very helpful review of Software Size Units, which is the latest way to think about the overall size of a software project taking into account both data and process. SSU seeks to overcome much of the difficulty and ambiguity of trying to count "points" needed for FPA.
One of my personal pet peeves is when developers do not include adequate effort in their estimates for test preparation and the overall testing effort. The book covers this area well and includes an excellent overview of incorporating testing into all your estimates, plus it explains multiple ways to help you do it. Since this is a significant area for me in my work, I have read this section over several times and have already incorporated many of the concepts and metrics covered in this book into my projects.
The only area that is not thoroughly covered in this book is how to estimate using iterative or Agile methodologies, as it tends to focus on the traditional software lifecycle process. However, there is still more than enough valuable information in this excellent book. Chemuturi's book is within easy reach on my desk, and is often stashed in my briefcase. It has easily become my bible for all things related to estimating software application development projects. It is a great value and should become part of any software development manager's toolkit.
Larry Hanthorn
Director, Delivery Excellence
Microsoft Corporation
Software Estimation Best Practices, Tools & Techniques: A Complete Guide for Software Project Estimators OverviewSoftware Estimation Best Practices, Tools & Techniques covers all facets of software estimation. It provides a detailed explanation of the various methods for estimating software size, development effort, cost, and schedule, including a comprehensive explanation of test effort estimation. This unique desk reference, for the novice to expert, also offers direction on which methods are most appropriate for each of the different software project types commonly executed and criteria for selecting software estimation tools. Key Features-- Presents software estimation best practices and shows how to avoid common pitfalls-- Demonstrates a practical methodology with templates for using Delphi estimation and analogy-based estimation for software projects-- Introduces a new method referred to as software size units for measuring software size that does not make use of the untenable concept of complexity for adjusting software size-- Provides useful methods for converting software size to effort, deriving true productivity, and analyzing variances between actual and estimated values as a tool for productivity improvement-- WAV offers a free downloadable test effort estimation tool (TPPal), a software size unit estimation tool (SSUPal), and a 180-day demo for a comprehensive estimation tool known as EstimatorPal available from the Web Added Value Download Resource Center at jrosspub.com

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