The movie (cartoon) itself was only 30-40 minutes long. The animation was better than your regular Saturday morning, despite what other reviewers might tell you.

However, it was not Disney feature film quality animation either. Somewhere in between.

The story was decent and original. You have not already seen it before.

The Bonus Features on the DVD are as good as the cartoon itself. If any of the three things interest you from a vocation/avocation standpoint or you are just curious, you might want to rent this DVD to be able to see them:

1. making of the movie (the real movie)
2. making of the animated movie (this one)
3. making of the game

The bonus features on this DVD are better than what you will find on most. Overall, they round out the cartoon short very nicely.

Not this book per se but its subject matter did have a little impact on my life.

In the summer of 1979, I saw a white paper newsletter – a magazine printed on plain, non-glossy, white paper.

Inside, I marveled, were articles and they were all about programming computers.

One of the articles in this magazine was about a language called PILOT. The article was written by the language’s inventor, John Starkweather, I believe. And there was an entire source code listing for it – in 8080 assembly language.

I bought the magazine and took it home with me.

The name of that magazine was “Dr. Dobb’s”. This was one of the first issues ever of that magazine. That issue is almost 30 years old now.

Computers have changed a bit since then too.

So have I. But I still like to look at a good computer program listing from time to time.

I write much longer ones than I did back then too.

This is the only book I know of on the PILOT programming language.

PILOT – The Language And How to Use It including Apple PILOT and SuperPILOT is a pretty good book.

This book is almost exactly the size of the original book on Pascal programming by Nicklaus Wirth, the Pascal User Manual & Report.

This book thoroughly covers the much simpler – and far less powerful – PILOT language.

PILOT had its heyday, if you can call it that, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was well-suited to writing programs that did CAI (Computer Aided Instruction).

These days, what was known as CAI is called CBT (Computer Based Training). CBT applications are implemented with GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) as is pretty much all consumer software nowadays.

PILOT applications were marked by being predominantly text-based output, keyboard input to answer questions, some very basic logic/math capabilities, and very simple pattern-matching capabilities.

The language had no database facilities or GUIs. Those really did not come into consumer computing until after PILOT’s time.

PILOT did not even have facilities for file input/output! Apple’s implementation, called Apple PILOT, did support using data files.

Apple also had the ability to draw graphics. Just what was called “high resolution” graphics at the time. It only ran on an Apple II computer, so they were not really all that high resolution.

This book covers all these versions.

There are many examples in this book, tables describing its syntax/grammar, some illustrations, and even quaint little Apple II screenshots of running PILOT programs.

There is a table of contents well as a good index.

If you need to understand PILOT programs out there somewhere, or you just want to learn the language – then I do recommend this book. However, I think the language itself is quite dated and lacks support for any of the modern things we take for granted in computer software today.

Most of this rather slim book focusses on the “typed event channel” design pattern.

However, it is a really good pattern.

Highly motivated readers will also go and seek out information on the ValueModel feature of the PARC Place systems VisualWorks. It is programmed in SmallTalk, so the implementation will not interest most programmers. However, the architecture – the design patterns – are really cool.

And they fit in nicely with the one described in this book.

It is an interesting reference on a subject a lot of people take in on a purely emotional basis.

This guy, instead, chooses to portray it with a lot of facts. He illustrates his points with tables of numbers, punctuating them with anecdotes and historical footnotes.

The purely emotional stuff you can get anywhere. And, like free advice, it is worth what you pay for it. Since this book leaves out such baggage it is reasonably slim and easy to read.

It is very specialized and I do not recommend it for everyone doing web application programming on Java.

If you are doing something that turns out to be really tricky, and you need to know precisely how Tomcat works with respect to that, this book can be pretty helpful. It will speed your ability to understand it.

However, for everyone else using Tomcat – this is not the book for you. Get one of the other JSP or Tomcat books I have read or recommended here.

I am not saying this book is bad, just that it has a very specific purpose/usefulness.

If you want to be a total Tomcat guru, understanding Tomcat internals, this book will help – along with reading the source code, documentation, relevant standards, and other books on the subject.

There are still a few J5SE features I have not used. I want to use all of it. This book and the Nutshell one will let me touch all the bases.

It has a little bit to say about every piece of significant software included with the Mac (in OS 10.4) – and that is a lot.

I want to brush up and make sure I have at least a basic knowledge of everything. At least as much as they cover.

It sure has a lot of good coverage on doing SOAP web services.

I would have been happier if it also covered how to do XML-RPC web services in Java but for some reason, Sun does not seem really big on including XML-RPC support with Java.

That is unfortunate, because a lot of the web fabric using XML-RPC not SOAP.

Blogging APIs, the ones that are not REST-based, for example, use XML-RPC.

As far as describing programming SOAP-based web services goes, the book seems pretty thorough.

The Spring framework was interesting at the time I read it.

Since then, EJB 3.0 has come out. Ditto for JDK 1.5, which introduces annotations – a one-stop way to do configuration that beats XML in many ways.

The Spring framework seems slightly less relevant now that these two vital Java things are out.