What is N-Topus?
N-topus is a consulting and software development company based in Hamilton NY. We write books and speak at professional conferences. Our main products have been multimedia educational materials. We're currently reconstructing our MannX (Multimedia Annotator - XML) technology -- it was built around Quicktime for Java and then retargetted for Sun's Java Media Framework, but we are now developing Flash-based material; see our annotation of Jon Udell's KeeneFlood, which also uses the hierarchy-of-topics structure we recently reported in SWAP 2005: Semantic Web Applications and Perspectives, 2nd Italian Semantic Web Workshop, our paper being (PDF) Semantic Annotations for Digital Video. The quicktime Multimedia Intermediate Russian Textbook is therefore not for sale at the moment, but here's a review from calico.org; an overall evaluation of 4 out of 5, with caution that it's awkward to install and should be more extensible. Fair enough; if we can get it to work with FLV movies, it will only require an up-to-date browser with Flash. Contact n-topus for further details.

Books
Alexander Nakhimovsky and Tom Myers have co-authored a series of books and book sections on Javascript, Java, XML, and the Semantic Web. Our most recent publication is (as of February 2005) in press; it's a chapter in the second edition of Visualizing the Semantic Web by Vladimir Geroimenko and Chaomei Chen. A year ago (end of 2003) we finished Google, Amazon, and Beyond: Creating and Consuming Web Services ; the slashdot description is that "it's useful for developers on both sides of a web-service transaction, but honestpuck cautions that its value varies with your attachment to Java."

Our co-authored books began with Javascript Objects in 1998; then Professional Java XML Programming with servlets and JSP in 1999 (this actually came to amazon.com early in January of 2000, but we were delighted to see that the Amazon-assigned publication date was 1912. We've been doing Java for a long time). We wrote parts of the multi-author Wrox books Professional JSP : Using JavaServer Pages, Servlets, EJB, JNDI, JDBC, XML, XSLT, and WML, Professional WAP, and Professional Java Server Programming J2EE Edition, all in 2000. In 2002 we switched from Wrox to Apress and finished XML Programming: Web Applications and Web Services With JSP and ASP, followed by Google, Amazon and Beyond, and a chapter of Visualizing the Semantic Web , with Springer, as already mentioned.