Customer Reviews

Constructing Intelligent Agents Using Java: Professional Developer's Guide, 2nd Edition

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

 

 

From the beginning of chapter 1 to the end of the index, this book is 408 pages. The authors do not begin to discuss agents until chapter six (page 201). So ~half of this book is merely introductory material. It's impossible to give more than a token survey to search, KR, back/forward chaining, fuzzy systems and neural networks in the allocated 200 pages. I feel this was a wasted effort best left to other books (like Russell and Norvig).

In contrast to the 200 page intro to AI, there is no primer on Java contained within this book. I feel this is OK since there are also many excellent books on Java. I only mention this to be complete in my review.

The real meat of this book is only ~165 pages (chapter 6 through 10). The agent examples are light, but adequate and I feel the concepts come across. Overall, I'm not sure I got my money's worth. I would have liked more discussion of various frameworks and maybe some examples of these. Implementations are lumped together in a hurried review in the last chapter.

If you already have some exposure to AI, you might consider a more advanced book. If you have never thought about AI, this book might serve as an introduction, but it is certainly not a comprehensive review.

I enjoyed reading this book -- particularly the humorous comments throughout that lightened up things. The example applications in almost every chapter were a good test bed to play around with and explore the concepts. I would not have understood things nearly as well without them. As the authors state, they don't teach you everything you need to know about the AI pieces, but with some digging on my own, I THINK I understand the basics enough to make progress. The UML package diagrams are worthless, and I wish the space had been used for something else -- maybe more background info or a summary of the agents in the chapter. But that is a minor complaint. I really liked the book and I'm anxious to apply some of the AI and agent techniques in my upcoming projects.

I enjoyed reading the book. It is a fair introduction to intelligent agents. The main concern I have is the (too) brief discussion of the underlying concepts. I would be surprised if anyone with no idea of these techniques can actually pick up much beyond the superficial. Since this is an introduction, this is less of a fault. But, this should not be a "text", as claimed by the authors; it can at best be served as a supplement to an existing text in AI or machine learning (e.g., Bishop 1995; Winston 1991; Russell and Novig, 1995; Mitchell, 1997, etc.)

Regarding the code provided: they are cleanly written except not well designed. (e.g., field variables are package visible and are used as obj.field throughout the code -- bad OO practice). If what one needs is to "pull" code into existing applications, think twice.

This is one of those rare books that was a mess in its first incarnation that has been cleaned up, had new material added, and turns out to be quite helpful in its second edition. It is assumed that the reader already knows Java, as this is not a primer in that language. The first half of the book is a very informal introduction to AI concepts relevant to the construction of intelligent agents. The second half of the book is where the author presents his own design and implementation of a Java framework for constructing intelligent agents along with several applications. The author does a good job of showing algorithms in numbered steps, presenting mathematics clearly when applicable - such as in the section on neural networks, and having numerous clear illustrations. There are exercises at the conclusion of each chapter that are unsolved because most of them are programming assignments.
Although this book does a good job of describing what an intelligent agent is and then implementing simple examples, you might want to get a more academic text such as "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" for all of the individual algorithm details. These two book should complement each other well as this book is better at painting the big picture of intelligent agents and "AI a Modern Approach" is more thorough. I did find that there were some problems with the Java code, but it was pretty easy to spot them and fix them rather quickly. I recommend this as a useful reference on intelligent agents as they are implemented in Java.

I like the highbrow reviews, but, I can tell *none* of these people actually used any of the code. There are a few bugs in the CIAgent class and there is a missing file for the infofilter class.

As a beginner in AI and java (not software development), this book was very helpful is getting the right concepts early. Does anybody have a copy of URLReaderAgentCustomizer.java?

Having reviewed tons of articles, I found this book a good introduction to Intelligent Agents. The authors give introduction to different AI techniques within Rule Based systems and Learning systems. Furthermore, they introduce how to write autonomous intelligent agents. If you are considering to use IBM ABLE, this is a very good start.

Este libro es una excelente referencia práctica, que redefine la Inteligencia Artificial desde el punto de vista de los agentes, existen referencias complementarias a este libro "Inteligencia Artificial un Enfoque Moderno: Libro del Agente Inteligente". El libro explica de forma práctica la implantación de diversas técnicas usadas en la inteligencia artifical, búsquedas en amplitud, búsquedas en profundidad, heurísticas, etc. Es un muy buen libro para la enseñanza de la Inteligencia Artificial con un enfoque práctico.