Customer Reviews

Applied Evolutionary Algorithms in Java

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Java being the choice language for enterprise no-bs concrete applications I was expecting a practical viewpoint and a hands-on approach in this book. It turns out this skimpy booklet is
more of a an extended paper, something like a thesis with no practical value ( and hence no value at all). It won't teach you neither GA algorithms nor how to use Java to code them. The Java
word was put in to fool buyers exploiting the Java marketing wave. The only java GA algorithm presented in this book is in appendix B.... can it get worse than this?

I completely agree with the previous reviewers. In fact, I found their criticism rather light. On the back cover, the book is presented as an introductory book with pratical emphasis. Although the book is very easy to follow (reading it cover to cover takes about 2-3 hours), it's definitely not at an introductory level. It covers basic material on GA & GP without sufficient detail. Furthermore, the design of the book is terrible. The author has allocated 105 pages to bibliography and appendices (the book has 225 pages). Therefore, the core material occupies only 120 pages. Moreover, the 2 chapters about GA and GP are totally 30 pages long ! The remaining 90 pages are about some not-so-interesting applications and future directions in EC. The bibliography is not at the end of the book. This makes following the references rather frustrating.

I've read/browsed at least 10 books on GA/EC. This is definitely the worst one. I recommend Eiben & Smith's "Introduction to Evolutionary Computing" and Michalewicz & Fogel's "How to Solve It: Modern Heuristics" to everyone interested in GA/EC.

i'm not sure this book is a good idea to start with evolutionary algorithms. The treatment it provides is certainly of an acceptable level, but it is too short to provide a deep understanding of how genetic algorithms work. If you want to understand how GAs work, Goldberg is THE place where to start. The code there is in Pascal, but frankly i don't see the advantage of Java for coding evolutionary algorithms for the first time. Maybe only after one has mastered the internals of genetic algorithms one can go to Java for advanced evolutionary algorithms for more complex tasks. One has first to understand well how data structures and operators work with a rather low-level language (C or C++), and then use Java for higher-level algorithms.

So although the content of this book is not bad at all, i'm not sure it's well-suited for newcomers, and for advanced people the material is too simple for bringing something new. The only contribution of this book from my viewpoint is the large number of websites where evolutionary code is available.

I only browsed the book but I perfectly agree with my friend from milano. Another one of those little useless trash marked with high price because they knew there would be few buyers. How can my favorite publisher Springer join this business? (John-Wiley seems to be the pioneer on this.)

Actually I disagree to most of the comments submitted by other reviewers - In my opinion this book is really great, especially for people who are new to the areas of Evolutionary Algrorithms and Programming and particulary looking for ways on how to apply these technologies in practical terms. There are not many books out there which are (1) easy to understand, (2) provide sufficient and "what-you-should-know" type of information about the discussed technologies and (3) application-oriented and practical rather than theoretical. This, in my opinion is very important as it allows the reader also to understand how e.g. GA's can be implemented. Also the use of JAVA language for the practical demonstration and examples are very handy since it is currently one of the most widely used and popular programming language.
I believe that this book is very suitable as a course material for students (like me) who are new to the areas of Evolutinary Algorithms. In addition, it provides a large survey of references and websites where evolutionary code is available.

I haven't read this book yet (hence the intermediate 3 stars rating), but I think people should know that, [...] See e.g. http://www.techbookreport.com/tbr0031.html