Customer Reviews

The Fax Modem Sourcebook

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

 

 

This book receives five enthusiastic stars for the outstanding information content but only four stars for the included sample software.

I've been a commercial fax software developer for more than ten years, and I was surprised to see how much I learned in this book. The information content is the best I've ever seen for a fax modem book, and Andrew Margolis' writing style is professional and very easy to read. He is clearly a veteran of this business, and it seems like he really enjoys writing.

He exhaustively covers virtually everything that one would need to do anything with a fax modem: T.4 image structure, class 1, class 2, class 2.0, T.30 handshaking, and TIFF files. His coverage is exceptionally complete, and he does not limit himself to just the standards. Throughout the text he discusses where the real world conflicts with "how it should be" and how one works around them. One cannot wish these issues away, and discovering them early rather than later is simply golden.

Coverage of serial-port control is a bit thin, and it only addresses the PC platform, but this is such a minor nit that it does not detract from the work as a whole. UNIX developers will have to discover how to talk serial ports from some other source.

The only reason this does not receive five stars is that the sample software seems fairly pedestrian and not terribly good as an example. It seems that Andrew has sacrificed substantial performance for potential clarity, something I attribute to a likely conscious choice rather than an oversight. Since he is probably also a commercial fax developer, I suspect he didn't want to give away his secrets. I know that most of the "bit-banging" code is horrendously slow, although probably straightforward to read. In his position I may have made the same tradeoff, but the reader is left to perform these optimizations himself. Some of the optimizations are not at all obvious.

Anybody remotely involved in writing or supporting fax software should have this book. Other than my objections to the include sample code, I cannot think of a single thing that would have improved this book, other than it having it be in my library ten years ago.

I needed information how to develope a fax sending program for a fax modem, but it was hard to get the information. But this book solved all my problem.

This book helped me to get my fax gateway development project up and running in (a rather sleepless) 3 days. Would recommend for anyone looking to implement facsimile send/receive. Much more readily comprehensible than the ITU specifications.

This book is like a bible for Fascimile technology. Which includes complete code to drive your class 1 and 2 modems. I found just one bug in making my intel modem work. I have never seen such a comprehensive book. kudos to the author.

This is a great book.
Very well written.
The source code works great.

System S/W development enginner. I'd like to get fax-programming solutions.