by Douglas Lyon,
lyon@cse.bridgeport.edu
In the 26 books which I have reviewed and
listed in my Bibliography below, none addresses the central issue of
decoding and encoding audio streams. This mean that the only thing a
reader can do with the information in the books reviewed is play
audio to the speaker.
They cannot: Synthesize their owns sounds,
Process existing, write sounds to a file, read and display sounds.
[Linden] is the only exception. He does not
decode the audiostream. He does reverse it to permit the reversing of
an audio clip. I have contacted Peter van der Linden. He did not know
of sun's plans for the future of audio in java. Peter works at sun.
Audio does not appear to be a high-priority item for the java team. I
contacted the author of the software which Peter used in his book. He
indicated that the decoding of the audio could be done, but has not.
I have written my own CODEC's for u-law files, in java.
[Anuff] has 7 pages on playing audio clips.
This books also puts a graphic user interface for audio manipulation,
letting you push a button to play the clip.
[Chan and Lee] has 5 pages on audio (2 on clips
and 3 on applets). It tells you how to play audio.
[Campione and Walwalrath] has 3 pages on
playing audio clips. [Cornell and Horstmann] has 4 pages on playing
audio clips.
[Deitel and Deitel] has 7 pages on playing
audio clips.
[Espeset ] has information which allows the
reader to play sounds. It covers sound in 10 pages.
[Fraizer and Bond] has 5 pages on playing audio
clips.
[Geary and McClellan] This book does not cover
audio. It is a pure graphics book.
[Gosling et al.] and [Arnold and Gosling] have
no mention of audio. They are pure language descriptions.
[Jackson and McClellan] and [Daconta] have
nothing on sound or audio clips.
[Lea et al.] 7 pages on playing audio clips.
This deal with localization of audio using VRML extensions in the
VRML.node package. Unique, but very VRML oriented. [Lea] Does not
mention audio. It is a pure concurrency book. [Lemay and Perkins] 3
pages on playing audio clips.
[Linden] is the only book in print which shows
how to do something other than play audio files straight from disk.
This book shows how to reverse and play audio. 6 pages total.
[Nagaratnam et al.] has 5 pages on playing
audio clips. [Newman et al.] 5 pages on playing audio
clips.
[Ritchey] has 2 pages on loading and playing
sound files.
[Pew] Focus on GUI and audio. Plays audio clips
using a button and with text. 12 pages (including a 2 page code
example in the back of the book). [Perry] covers audio clip playing
and also shows how to play random clips. 10 pages of
coverage
[Tyma et al.] Two pages on playing audio clips
with a paragraph in the back of the book.
[Vanderberg] has of playing audio clips. Also
has introduction to digitization. 8 pages total coverage.
[Walnum] Covers playing audio clips in 5 pages.
[Winston] Does not menion audio. It does have a nice picture of a sax
on the cover, go figure.
[Wutka et al.] 9 pages on playing audio on
demand. An interesting approach to audio clip management.
No book reviewed shows how to obtain a FFT
in Java. None shows how to write an image file out to disk. Some
image processing functions are shown in a few of the books. Most show
how to display images using the AWT.
[Chan and Lee] have an image filter example
which shows how to flip an image. There are 4 pages of coverage.
[Espeset] and [Pew] have very similar coverage
of the image filter class. Neither appears to have drawn on any of
the traditional literature of the field. Neither takes the
traditional approach of Digital Filter for imaging. Their algorithms
for digital image processing appear ad-hoc and do not address
low-pass filtering or any transform theory.
[Espeset] has a chapter on image processing in
java. He covers blurring, wave displacement, spiral transformations,
brightening, and rotation. The image warping is 2D. There are no
affine transforms. There is 50 pages of coverage.
[Geary and McClellan] show how to bleach an
image.
[Linden] shows how to load and draw images. He
gives 27 pages of coverage.
[Nagaratnam et al.] mentions the HSB color
model. This book also covers a small filter application that can
invert a color map and perform a horizontal inversion.
[Pew] has 20 pages on image applets. He covers
slanting, rotation (in 2 D) mirror, blurring, embossing, and wave
displacement. There are no affine transformations here. Negation,
scaling and croping are shown.
[Vanderburg] has 30 pages on color models and
filters.
Prices are list, except where otherwise
noted. $?? = price not on book.
AW = Addison Wesley
PH = Prentice Hall