AC/DC: Two Sides to Every Glory: The Complete Biography
Average customer rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
  • Nothing new...
  • Nothing new.
  • GOOD BOOK ON AC/DC
  • Good deal
  • AC/DC will always rock
AC/DC: Two Sides to Every Glory: The Complete Biography
Paul Stenning
Manufacturer: Chrome Dreams
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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  1. Highway to Hell : The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott Highway to Hell : The Life and Times of AC/DC Legend Bon Scott
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ASIN: 1842403087
Release Date: 2007-09-25

Book Description

AC/DC have been swaggering their way through the rock 'n' roll scene for more than 30 years. Starting with their roots in the Australian pub circuit, this book takes a thorough look at where the band came from, where they've been, and where they're going. Bon Scott and the Young brothers' earlier bands are discussed, as well as the trio's first collaboration, supplemented by rare photographs and interviews with more than 50 of the band's friends and colleagues. Previously unpublished details on Bon Scott's untimely death in 1980 and the strange circumstances around it are revealed, along with information on AC/DC's upcoming album, their first in five years.

Customer Reviews:

2 out of 5 stars Nothing new..........2006-09-06

This is just another rock "biography" that is nothing more than footage taken together from magazines and other books. Of course, there are no interviews with key member of AC/DC given specifically to this book (the Young brothers just don't permit it). All in all, there is absolutely nothing new here. I suggest you to read "Highway To Hell".

1 out of 5 stars Nothing new........2006-09-04

What can you say about a book that doesn't even manage to get Bon Scott's date of birth right? Seemingly cobbled together from fansites, old interviews and bits lifted from Clinton Walker's far superior tome on Bon Scott, this offered no fresh insight into the band or their history. The narrative was confusing and choppy and looked like a patchwork of third hand information. A long, rambling and inconclusive chapter about Bon's death did nothing to raise the stakes. The definative AC/DC book is out there somewhere, but this ain't it.

5 out of 5 stars GOOD BOOK ON AC/DC.......2006-03-21

An interesting read , gives the whole picture of the band and the members from start to the present....If you are into AC/DC then this book will be a satisfying read....

4 out of 5 stars Good deal.......2006-02-14

No complaints here. The writer's a fan and clearly enjoyed putting this thing together. I can always tell when someone did their homework and there's no doubt Stenning did. All eras are covered and there's pics in there too. The close attention paid to the late great Bon Scott's life and contribution to rock was very cool. If you want to learn everything about the boys from down under this is a good place to start.

3 out of 5 stars AC/DC will always rock.......2006-02-12

AC/DC will always rock and this book explains why. They got the story right. The detail as to the early stages of the band is what I enjoyed above all else. The historic turning over of the reigns from Dave Evans to Bon Scott. I doubt there's ever been a single more important move in rock history as far as frontment go. Bon went from driving the band to gigs to literally driving the band to superstardom. It's tragic he passed at such a young age (33) and on the brink of worldwide domination. Brian took over and has done a fine job keeping the AC/DC juggernaut going strong but there will never be another one like Bon. All versions of the band are well covered and you have a discography plus more. If you're a fan of AC/DC you can't be without this book.

Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • blasts from the past!
  • Fun but not enough
  • Okay...But...
  • Very complete...
  • They once built towers to the sky.....
Yesterday's Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future
Joseph J. Corn , and Brian Horrigan
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0801853990

Book Description

Enormous skyscrapers will house residents and workers who happily go "for weeks" without setting foot on the ground. Streamlined, "hurricane-proof" houses will pivot on their foundations like weather vanes. The family car will turn into an airplane so easily that "a woman can do it in five minutes." Our wars will be fought by robots. And our living room furniture--waterproof, of course--will clean up with a squirt from the garden hose.

In Yesterday's Tomorrows Joseph J. Corn and Brian Horrigan explore the future as Americans earlier in the last century expected it to happen. Filled with vivid color images and lively text, the book is eloquent testimony to the confidence--and, at times, the naive faith--Americans have had in science and technology. The future that emerges here, the authors conclude, is one in which technology changes, but society and politics usually do not.

The authors draw on a wide variety of sources--popular-science magazines, science fiction, world fair exhibits, films, advertisements, and plans for things only dreamed of. From Jules Verne to the Jetsons, from a 500-passenger flying wing to an anti-aircraft flying buzz-saw, the vision of the future as seen through the eyes of the past demonstrates the play of the American imagination on the canvas of the future.

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars blasts from the past!.......2005-10-10

nice book about old visions of the future!
Very nice pictures and illustrations!
I would like to get more pictures but this is a very nice book!

3 out of 5 stars Fun but not enough.......2005-09-05

I agree with the reviewer below. It's one of the few books on this subject (I've only seen one other) so we have to live with it. On the other hand it's small, it's a bit scattered in its approach, and it feels like a museum gift-shop item/show catalogue of sorts. I would like to see someday a huge, profusely illustrated, and text-rich book on the complete history of portraying the future (positively) which is an historically recent phenomenon. It died probably around the time of the '64 World's Fair and depictions of the future since then have been largely dystopian. Nowadays they're downright awful. This is something we need to address because unless you can conjure up imagery of an upbeat future you're not likely to even try to create one. This book made me miss the days when people thought more positively and hopefully about many things, regardless of how bad it was at the time. Imagine the images in the mind of the average contemporary young person of the "World of 2050."

2 out of 5 stars Okay...But..........2005-06-20

Amid the other glowing reviews, let me offer a different perspective.

First, I was a bit disappointed in the size of the graphics. The book is only about 6 3/4" by 8 3/4", and the graphics and photos in many cases are difficult to see. In the cases of copies of book extracts and magazine images, they are often nearly impossible to resolve.

More troubling to me is the overall "lean" of the book. Expecting a fun book reflecting on images of the future, I was disappointed to read things like "The visual cacophony of the advertising-laden landscape was for him [Edward Bellamy of Boston in the 1880s]...the most palpable of symbols for the general depravity of the capitalist system."

And how about this quote from the section on space toys of the 1940s and '50s: "Girls who yearned to project themselves into a fantasy future through their toys had few media role models beyond the stereotype of the hero's girlfriend. The dual message to the younger generation seems clear enough--the future will be violent [too many space guns], and it will belong to men."

And here is how the book reviews the "Star Trek" series: "Though the crew, with black Uhura and the Asian Mr. Sulu, seemed to reflect newly enlightened attitudes, the program, like its 1930 relatives, was dominated by brave white males."

In discussing the future of housing, the book diverges from any discussion of future technology, and instead offers: "We ask whether the home of tomorrow will be inhabited predominantly by single-parent families, by working mothers and children. Will it contain greater numbers of couples without children at all, couples of the same sex, or other groups of adults living together, and if so with what social consequences?"

And as a final example of the social messages of the book, how about these phrases from the section "The Weapons and Warfare of Tomorrow":

"Although Americans have long cherished the myth that they are an unusually peace-loving people..."

"...just one more instance of the American habit of believing in that ultimate weapon, a technological fix, as a substitute for politics in eliminating world conflicts."

And finally: "...it ironically symbolized the country's broader policy on Viet Nam, an effort to refashion a foreign environment better fit to American needs and expectations."

To my taste, the book has too many unnecessary social messages. I was expecting a book on past visions of the future. Instead, I got a book on technology laced with criticisms of capitalism, Amercianism, and political policies. Those weaknesses cheapen what could have been a far more enjoyable publication.

5 out of 5 stars Very complete..........2004-01-17

Most books about past visions of the future deal with cities of the future, robots of the future and houses (or should I say kitchens) of the future. And this book DOES deal with those subjects and MORE. Between the covers of this book are plans for atomic powered cars, tanks, and bombers, the promises found within hobby magazines, chapters on the movies and radio shows that showed us the future, the designs for bomb proof cities and homes, hopes for the flying car, the idea for death rays, flying tanks and much, much more.
Having been first published in 1984 it even hints at what visions we still believed in that would appear in our future, from the space shuttle to real laser weapons. Kind of fun but also kind of sad.

5 out of 5 stars They once built towers to the sky............2003-12-25

Yesterday's Tomorrows is a great, evocative book.

Stemming from a traveling exhibit sponsored in Michigan by the Michigan Humanities Council, its retro-future images (comprised of period memorabilia, car designs, advertisements, and architectural wonders) are bountiful, crisply reproduced and accompanied by text that adds context to the visual journey.

And what a journey! Travel back to an anticipated future when modernism and futurism were part of the manifest destiny of humankind.

Employing an added bit of retrospective frisson, in the post 9/11 world, this mid-80s work now serves as a window on a future that would never be realized, of a time when people still dreamed of building towers to the sky. Thankfully, its unabashed message of near-limitless possibilities is conveyed utterly without irony.

This volume can be enjoyed on so many levels. Delight in the visual salience of images gathered from dozens of rare sources. Lavish your attention on the many literary influences and how these images would inspire a whole genre of science fiction and futurist works, from Buckminster Fuller to Gene Roddenberry to Alvin Toffler.

In this "shape of things to come," the future, our present, is always a golden destiny of exotic creative and technological evocations and innovations - even when the future is more dystopian than utopian.

It is a reminder that hope and vision, art and science, are intrinsic to the human condition and surely the salvation for our own, as yet unwritten, future.
Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Oxford American Lectures)
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • Tour-de-force.
  • Inconsistent and lackes historical support
  • A different vision of our visions.
Visions of the Future: The Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow (Oxford American Lectures)
Robert Heilbroner
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 019510286X

Book Description

"This is an exceedingly long short book, stretching at least fifty thousand years into the past and who knows how many into the future." So begins Visions of the Future, the prophetic new book by eminent economist Robert Heilbroner. Heilbroner's basic premise is stunning in its elegant simplicity. He contends that throughout all of human history, despite the huge gulf in social organization, technological development, and cultural achievement that divides us from the earliest known traces of homo sapiens, there have really only been three distinct ways of looking at the future. During a period Heilbroner refers to simply as the Distant Past, stretching from prehistory to the appearance of modern nation-states in seventeenth century Europe, there was no notion of a future measurably and materially different from the present or the past. From the Stone Age to the Bronze, Mesopotamia and Egypt to Greece and Rome, and throughout the Middle Ages, a continuum of cultures and civilizations shared one defining expectation--the absence of any expectation of material progress for the great masses of people. Heilbroner maintains that it was not until the first stirrings of the period he refers to as Yesterday, spanning from roughly 1700 to 1950, that the future entered into human consciousness as a great beckoning force. Capitalism, continually reinvigorated by the seemingly endless forward march of science and an evolving sense of democracy, appeared to promise all levels of society some expectation of a future at least somewhat better than the past. It was this unwavering faith in the superiority of the future that separated Yesterday from the age we have now entered, that of Today. While we are still driven towards tomorrow by the same forces that determined the recent past, the lessons of Hiroshima and Chernobyl, the chaos in the former Soviet Union, the stagnation of the West, and the anarchic rage unleashed in our inner cities and in hot spots around the globe have brought on a palpable anxiety that is quite apart from both the resignation of the Distant Past or the bright optimism of Yesterday. In a brilliant conclusion drawing together the threat of nuclear blackmail, global warming and the growing commodification of life represented by video games, voice mail, and VCRs, Visions of the Future issues a call to face the challenges of the twenty-first century with a new resolve strengthened by the inspiration of our collective past.

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Tour-de-force........2002-12-05

In this small book Robert Heilbroner succeeds in summarizing his vision on the history of mankind from the beginning to the ... future.
"Resignation sums up the Distant Past's vision of the future, hopefulness was that of Yesterday; and apprehension is the dominant mood of Today." (p.69)
His analyses are succinct, clear and on target.
His vision for tomorrow and after is more speculative:"a spectrum of capitalisms is the most probable political setting for the Western world over the coming of the next century, but that ultimately capitalism will exhaust its vitality, perhaps making way in some societies for a more egalitarian society and in others for more centralized and controlledones." (p.115)
I believe that capitalism will continue to be the dominant economic system in the far future, but that the proceeds of the successes of capitalism will be better distributed under the pressure of the democratic process.
But I agree with the author that in order to 'save' our planet, we need a stabilization of the population of the globe and a better protection of the environment.
A small, but important and stimulating book. Not to be missed.

2 out of 5 stars Inconsistent and lackes historical support.......1998-09-19

Most noticeable error in Heilbroners work is the lack of a reasonable historical support from which he arrived to his conclusions. Although Heilbroner may have provided a plausible conclusion on what things might imaginably be, especially in the field of economics from which he laid heavy emphasis in the last part, he failed to provide to the readers justification on his central concept of dividing the distant past, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. In short, the most contestable part of his study is the dating of the period. Going through the text repeatedly, I can almost say with certainty that no where in the book can we find a valid even justification on the timelines that separates the so-called distinctive eras of mankind. Much worse is Heilbroners summation of the mood of this era's stating that of the distant past as characterized by resignation, hopefulness that of yesterday and apprehension for today. One would marvel on the genius of the author on such summation in so brief a book, which poorly contains sufficient historical data, not even enough to assert clearly the division of time.

5 out of 5 stars A different vision of our visions........1996-10-12

Robert Heilbroner has again proven the insight which has made him one of the twentieth century's greatest economic minds. Now, Heilbroner has turned from ecnomy and focused his intellect on human perception of the future. He categorizes human history into four major eras: Distant Past, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow. He then goes on to illustrate how each era perceived the future and what it would bring. Using this, Heilbroner then postulates how our perception has changed and what the future may hold

Flowers and Bouquets Iron-on Transfer Patterns
Average customer rating: Not rated
    Flowers and Bouquets Iron-on Transfer Patterns
    Charlene Tarbox
    Manufacturer: Dover Publications
    ProductGroup: Book
    Binding: Paperback

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    ASIN: 0486288226

    Book Description

    Versatile collection of 58 reusable transfer patterns featuring finely detailed outlines of roses in full bloom, stately lilies, tulips, daisies and many other flowers — some single blossoms, others gathered into sprays, bouquets, nosegays, garlands, and other popular floral arrangements. Use on any surface that absorbs ink.
    Flowers and Bouquets:  iron-on transfer patterns
    Average customer rating: Not rated
      Flowers and Bouquets: iron-on transfer patterns
      Tarbox
      Manufacturer: see notes for publisher info
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      Binding: Hardcover
      ASIN: B000OMZOG4

      MDA Explained: The Model Driven Architecture(TM): Practice and Promise (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
      Average customer rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
      • Informative, but premature
      • MDA is here is to stay
      • A vision of the future?
      • Visionaries or unrealistic idealists? I don't know.
      • Warning - The book influence your mindset
      MDA Explained: The Model Driven Architecture(TM): Practice and Promise (The Addison-Wesley Object Technology Series)
      Anneke Kleppe , Jos Warmer , and Wim Bast
      Manufacturer: Addison-Wesley Professional
      ProductGroup: Book
      Binding: Paperback

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      ASIN: 032119442X

      Customer Reviews:

      4 out of 5 stars Informative, but premature.......2004-06-07

      The MDA looks like a very promising solution to big problems.

      Big problems, almost by definition, have lots of parts. Today, that means databases, network protocols, incompatible languages, distributed processing on disparate platforms, and more. Building any one part on any one platform is easy enough. The problem is to guarantee that the database, the Enterprise Bean interfaces, the HTML forms, and everything else match each other. There are two ways to make matching work. First, you can spend the rest of your life running around and looking at all interacting pairs of things, hoping that nothing changed while you weren't looking. Second, you can derive all those parts automatically from a common source. That's what the MDA is about.

      The MDA defines hierarchies of meta- and meta-meta-models. If you read between the lines, you'll probably see that each level of meta-abstraction requires a successively more knowledgeable, capable developer. This book works at the highest levels, so probably won't make much sense to entry-level staff with a more concrete and immediate view. (I shudder to think about maintenance of high-level tools by entry-level staff, and it will happen, somewhere some day.) The MDA approach assumes complete fluency with the UML, MOF, OCL, and other alphabet soup. That is necessary because the MDA half-defines transformation rules that convert a specification, in successive steps, into code. It's a bit like the filter approach of XSLT.

      The good news is that one specification can be transformed into a database schema, a Java Bean, a web form, and more, by applying different transformations to the spec. Consistency is ensured, at least to the extent that the different transformation rules are correct and consistent.

      There are a few problems with the MDA approach. First, the authors point out that it's just not there. It's a blue-sky spec, with no underlying implementations. A few vendors have declared their products MDA-compatible. I'm reminded that a block of wood with two nails driven in wass compatible with the electrical safety specs from the old Ma Bell days. Non-interference is a form of compatibility, just not a very interesting one.

      Second, if you have a small problem, though, you're stuck. The only apparent way for MDA to handle a small problem is first to turn it into a big problem, then solve that. Victims of heavy-weight CASE tools in light-weight projects will have some experience of that already.

      Third, and most critical, is that it just isn't complete enough. The transformation rules, at least as shown here, don't really have the expressive power needed for generating compilable code. That operation, the one that matters, seems to be "implementation dependent", i.e. jungle rules. Also, despite the authors' assurance (sec 12.1.3) that MDA really will generate code that doesn't need manual involvement, they have no shown that. Quite the opposite. The sample application (p.120) shows how the model generates a business-rule method, but gives no indication how that method's body is to be defined!

      The MDA is interesting, but perhaps not the "paradigm shift" that the authors claim. In many ways, it's like the common code-generating CASE tools writ large. Getting to the authors' ultimate vision will take years, many incremental steps, and probably a good bit of pain on the developers' part.

      Still, software is getting bigger and software problems are getting bigger. They need to be tamed somehow, and maybe the MDA will address important parts of the problems. I'm watching and waiting, but getting on with my business in the mean time.

      //wiredweird

      5 out of 5 stars MDA is here is to stay.......2003-12-18

      There have been many talks about MDA, but none as "complete" as this book. Granted that MDA is still under development and who knows what will actually happen to it when it is actually released, the authors of this book do an extraordinary job explaining what MDA is at its current stage and what areas might still change for the better before its final release.
      MDA is here to stay. There are many people that are very skeptical about the future of MDA, but the authors thru show and tell, explain why MDA is very much needed by the community and why it is here to stay for a very long time. The book starts by touching on some of the current problems that the software development process is facing these days:
      · Productivity problem: Writing code is being productive, and models that do not relate to anything with the code and are just stick figures on papers don't really mean much
      · Portability Problem: The need to port applications from one platform to another, or from one technology to another
      · Interoperability Problem: The systems need to interoperate and integrate together much more smoothly than they do today
      · Maintenance and Documentation Problem: Documents don't really mean much if they are not representative of the current system and can not be used to figure out what the system does.

      It is very difficult; as you may have had the pleasure of finding out the hard way, to actually implement true round trip engineering. It is a great concept on paper, but once you start the process of coding who has the time to go back and update the model? Update the use-cases and propagate the changes all the way down stream to the test cases? Specially if your project is under the gun and is already behind the schedule. The truth of the matter is that until today, modeling has been a great concept to kick things off, but many managers, project leads, etc... do not see the value of modeling and how it can improve their software. MDA is the answer to these questions... It's what we like to have if we had it all... It is a promise of something grand and it's being presented in this book as such. This book is the blue print of where things in the software development process will be 3-5 years from now.

      The author then goes into the details of the MDA framework and breaks that up to 4 parts:
      · The Model
      · The language in which the model is written in
      · The transformation definition which describes how the model in one language can be transformed into another
      · Transformation tool which performs the transformation using a specific transformation definition

      Each part of the MDA framework is then broken up into its sub-parts and each are explained. The model, which is what we all are familiar with, is actually broken up to three parts in MDA:

      · The Platform Independent Model - PIM
      · The Platform Specific Model - PSM
      · The Code

      The bulk of what MDA is in the transformation tools that transform one model to the other. The author spends a great deal of the book explaining what these transformation tools could look like, and it actually gives three examples of such tools in this book:
      · Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for a relational database
      · Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for EJB's
      · Transformation tool to transform PIM to PSM for a client front-end written in JSP
      Each of these transformation tools is explained in great detail, and the depicted such that it is very easy for reader to follow the path of how the transformation is/should be done. The authors then talks about the transformation tools that take each PSM and transform it to Code. It is at every step of the way, from creating the PIM to Code, the authors spend a great deal of time explaining how MDA is introducing a new way of doing things better, faster and more efficiently.
      Metamodels and metalanguages are covered in chapter 8. A Model is written is a Language, which is defined by a Metamodel, which is written in a Metalanguage. MDA follows the same pattern. The metalanguage in which MDA is written is called the MOF. The metamodel for the MDA are written in MOF, and the modeling itself is done via UML. All the standards that are covered under OMG are covered in chapter 11, and is very interesting to see how pieces fit together, and how the "stack" is being built.
      All and all, Anneke Kleppe, et. al. did an extraordinary job in putting this book together. MDA is a buzz word that we have been here for sometime now, and it is great to finally have a book such as MDA Explained that clarifies the concepts and sheds some light on what's coming and what to expect.

      4 out of 5 stars A vision of the future?.......2003-10-31

      If you are interested in Model Driven Architecture (MDA) but you don't have a clear grasp of what it is or where the designers of MDA see it heading then you might want to pick up this brief, well-written description written by three authors who are well acquainted with MDA.

      MDA is the concept of using models developed using a modeling language (UML) to generate real applications. This book can be seen as a high level overview of MDA and at 150 pages it is a fairly easy and quick read. The authors show both what is available today (not too much) and what might be available in the future (perhaps all applications will be generated from models). The authors do try to make the book practical by showing how you can use modeling tools to at least build skeletons of code that can be the start of code development. MDA brings a new set of acronyms but this book explains each of them without too much pain.

      So how much of what is discussed here is needed by a typical developer or designer? Probably not too much. But if you want to keep your eye on the future of IT then this book is well worth the read. Perhaps one day writing code will be thought of the same way we think of writing machine language. When that happens you will be able to say you knew it was coming.

      4 out of 5 stars Visionaries or unrealistic idealists? I don't know........2003-09-01

      The authors of this book are either visionaries or unrealistic dreamers, and at this point I am not sure which it is. MDA is an acronym for Model Driven Architecture and it is a framework based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and other standards for representing software designs. Their main premise is that software development will eventually start with a Platform Independent Model (PIM) which represents the design of a solution to a problem. As the name implies, this is a model that does not incorporate anything that is specific to any platform.
      After the PIM is created, it is transformed into one or more Platform Specific Models (PSMs), each of which is specific to a particular platform. Each of the PSM's is then acted on by a platform specific conversion tool that will create the coded solution for that platform that conforms to the PSM specifications. They argue that since this step will be electronically executed, the point will eventually be reached where code is no longer written by humans.
      The authors are quite correct in pointing out the historical sequence of software development, which started with programming and constructing the computer being simultaneous events. This was followed by the development of assembly language and then the compiler, which raised the level of abstraction and caused a great deal of the code creation process to be automated. They use this background to argue that the MDA is several layers above that and a natural step in the upward movement of abstraction.
      While I certainly agree that the movement in programming has been to higher levels of abstraction and more code being automatically generated, I did not find their arguments convincing. They use several examples of automatic code generation that can proceed from a model, one of which is the generation of setter and getter functions. The problem as I see it is that creating setter and getter functions for private instance variables is the easiest programming task of all. In my opinion, going from this to creating code to solve complex tasks is not a difference in degree, but a difference in kind.
      Granted, the authors admit that the MDA is still in the preliminary stages, but all of us have heard stories about how tools such as web page creators continue to fail in many ways. Abstraction and automation of software have allowed developers to write programs with millions of lines of code, but there is every reason to believe that there is a limit as to how high the level of abstraction can go before it exceeds the capacity of humans to understand. Furthermore, if the tools that go from the MDA to the code do not create the precise solution, it is quite likely that the level of detail that one can write into the MDA will not be fine enough to represent all possible desired alterations from the automatically generated code. One simply cannot write all of what could be an enormous number of options into any conversion tool.
      Finally, if there are errors in the code generated from the MDA, debugging it would probably be impossible. The software development community finds it very difficult to write bug-free software, even when it is written by hand and meticulously examined. Since the conversion tools would be software that would most likely contain errors, then anyone debugging the code from an MDA would be looking through software that was automatically generated from a model that may be flawed by a program that is most certainly flawed.
      To conclude, I did find the book interesting and believe that some of what the authors envision will come true. However, at this time, it is clear that most of it will not happen in the near future. Our understanding of the software process is still too primitive to have the entire project successfully generated electronically from a model. There is also reason to believe that it is impossible.

      5 out of 5 stars Warning - The book influence your mindset.......2003-05-19

      MDA Explained written by Anneke Kleppe, Jos Warmer and Wim Bast is an excellent easy-to-follow book, understandable for a wide audience. This book is an absolute must for every professional involved in software development

      The MDA book explains Model Driven Architecture (MDA) in easy-to-follow steps.

      The tour begins with the disadvantages of traditional software development and follows with explaining how MDA can solve these traditional software development problems.

      The book step for step explains, in more and more details, the MDA framework, and gives answers on the following topics; What is a model; How is the relationship between the models arranged; What kind of models are there; What are transformations and so on.

      The book guides the reader with easy to understand examples, the combination of straight to the point text, and clear and understandable examples guaranties that the reader gets the complete MDA picture, in less then a day reading.

      I like to give one warning for the readers of this book; 'The book influences your software development mindset', your software development approach will never be the same again after reading this book.

      Have fun reading

      Dino Seelig, ITIS Informatisering.

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