Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to Digital Set-Top Boxes and Interactive TV

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This promising-sounding book is very poorly written and edited (or not edited at all) -- it's just loaded with mechanical, grammatical, and syntactical errors, horribly disorganized paragraphs and sections, redundancies, and examples of poor diction. In places, material is obviously drawn directly from manufacturers' and suppliers' data sheets or press releases, marketing puffery and hype intact.

Also, the book is quite inconsistent in its approach to technical detail, delving into detail on some subjects while skimming quickly over other subjects equally deserving of attention. At times I wondered whether I could have followed some of the explanations offered without my (modest) prior understanding of computing and networks, and at other times I found the explanations to be belaboring the obvious.

Nevertheless, the book does provide a useful, 10,000-foot flyby of interactive TV and set-top box developments. While it won't make you an expert in any one area (which it never intended to do), it will give you the lay of the land, the general sense of where the convergence of television, computing, and the Internet is heading. Those who want a more technical approach or more specifics will have no problem knowing what subjects to look into and where to look.

Thanks to O'Driscoll for pulling together an overview of the subject, but shame on Prentice Hall for putting out a book before it was ready.

To me, this book reads as if it has been thrown together in a hurry specifically to profiteer on a new industry. Virtually everything I've read seems blatantly cut and pasted from white papers and press releases from industry players (with not enough filtering to remove sales-pitch hyperbole), the diagrams that are supplied seem rushed, and many descriptions of visual topics (such as how a particular interface is laid out) are bizarely missing figures/snapshots.

However, in a nascent industry like this, the mere act of collating all the literature knocking around into one volume does the readership a service - so, despite itself, the "Essential Guide ..." is worth getting hold of.

Roll on more considered and value-adding books on the subject.

I purchased this book about 6 months ago (I write this review in March 2001). I have, on several occassions since attempted to derive some value from it. Unfortunately, it is a hodge-podge of unordered facts. It was substantially out of date even at the time of my purchase. Several of the companies and products discussed no longer exist. There seems to have been little thought as to the overall organization of information. I agree with the other reviewer who stated it seemed like this was a cut-and paste from information provided from the various manufacturers.

While you can learn somewhat out-dated information about the set-top box industry if you work at it - and believe me you have to work to make sense out of this information - there is very little here that cannot be learned by spending a few hours surfing the net. Even if it wasn't substantially out of date, it would be extremely difficult to recommend this book to anyone other than someone who MUST have access to this specific information and they can't find it anywhere else.

I have to imagine that this book was assembled by copy-and-paste from vendor's web sites, accompanied by "technical" additions by an author who either doesn't know what he's writing, or doesn't know how to write it. Examples are found on every page, but here's just one: on page 162, there's a subsection heading entitled "Support for Internet standards." It's a subsection of a rambling and wrong section about "Set-top Proxy Server Software." Here's the entire text of that subsection: "All set-top proxy servers provide protocol support for Internet protocols." How enlightening! Not. I think this book is a waste of time and money.

A lot of the information contained in THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO SET-TOP BOXES AND INTERACTIVE TV is specialized and arcane. Of course, this shouldn't be that great of a surprise, given the relatively small size of this particular field at the moment. The material covered in this book should give the newcomer to the field a lot of the valuable and fundamental information that they'll need to know. Unfortunately, some of the data is out of date, and there are several new things that have come about since the publication of this book. It's useful for someone who is just getting started, but I'd like to see a new edition written some time soon that takes the material mentioned here and goes farther with it.

There is quite a lot of information that's been packed into this book. In fact, at times it almost appears too compressed and some topics could have used much more elaboration. In particular, the chapter that deals primarily with the possible Internet applications only brushes the surface of what could be discussed. The topics that are touched on include: Digital TV (an overview), enhanced TV, set-top hardware architecture, set-top server architecture, set-top operating systems, set-top middleware, set-top platforms, set-top application development (Intranet, Internet and otherwise), electronic program guides, and set-top smart cards. As you can no doubt tell, this is a staggering amount of material to get through in only about three hundred pages. Obviously the level of detail is not going to be terribly high, but it is worth it to get an introduction to so many different topics.

For the programmers out there, think of this ESSENTIAL GUIDE as a breadth first search. It covers a wide range of areas, but it does so superficially. As something you read once to get a feel for the terminology and the particulars, this book is quite good. But it's not very effective as a resource or a reference, because the in-depth material one would need simply isn't present. A good introduction only.

Just commenced work in the world of digital television and purchased this book to learn the architecture of end to end systems. My general impression of the book is that it suceeded in explaining to me about digital set-top boxes and their practical applications in the future.In addition to the standard high level stuff on this subject the author delves deep into to how these new technologies work. It is a must to buy and provides a platform for a raft of more books on this huge subject in the coming years!

The cliche "a mile wide and an inch deep" comes to mind in describing this book. The book is probably only useful to those with very little exposure to technology and with no exposure to broadcast technology. Be warned, the book takes on every topic from relevant to the mundane, and offers a definition. Much of the content is simply generic content applicable to any type of new electronic system. For example, if you have no idea what HTML is, or the basic (i.e, two sentence) difference between Personal JAVA and a full JAVA implementation, then you may wish to purchase this book. Do not look here for a detailed explanation of any one topic. And, be prepared to wade through wordy explanations of simple topics. An example from page 48: "Electrical power is available in two forms: alternating current (AC) and direct currect (DC)."

Technical errors aside, this book is NOT an essential guide to digital STB and interactive tv. It is a primer to the concepts and terms used generically (and hence, inaccurately), in the industry.

I bought this book about 2 years ago however I never finished it, lately I picked it up again looking for some reference information and then I knew why I never finished it in the first place.
Aside from what other readers have pointed out about bad organization, cut and paste manufacturers' white papers and wishlists, I found the inconsistency in presenting the information in this book to be the prevalent pattern. Within the same section the reader is presented with sub-sections with completely different layouts : one technology is explained with graphs, the other with bullets, another one with a short paragraph etc...
Some information is explained extensively without merit, example : a set-top web browser uses HTML for displaying internet content (duh) and then he goes for about 2+ pages on how HTML works with explanation about HTML tags and the Back and Forward buttons etc...
A major technology like MPEG-2 didn't get the coverage it deserved.
Finally this author took advantage of the fact that not many books cover this specific area about interactive TV and with a misleading title like the "essential" guide he's under delivering big time. I highly don't recommend this book.

For all intense purposes the book is a 'paper based portal' of set-top technologies and associated standards. Additionally, the guide covers the range of interactive TV applications that are about to be deployed by telecommunication operators across the world. O'Driscoll has also developed a web site to complement the book. Essential reading for people who want to learn the basics and identify opportunities in this new multi-billion dollar industry.

This is very good unbiased technical book that covers most technologies and options available for television set top boxes - STB. The book starts by describing TV broadcast systems which can be helpful to software developers who are new to TV systems (a bit basic for experienced TV professionals). It does a great job of explaining STB operating systems, applications, and application program interfaces - APIs. The book provides a good description of the key steps in developing STB applications. Most diagrams (and there are many) are good (identify key components and relationships). It identifies and analyzes the key suppliers and their systems which is kind of a mini-directory of key STB manufacturers, middleware developers, and component providers (it can be hard to find and identify these companies). I might have only given this book a 4 star review if there were other available books because it is a bit old and has some choppy presentation (it is still an essential book today). If you are developing TV applications, this is a great book to round out your understanding of TV systems and STB operation.