The Bantam software package is a collection of tools designed to aid organizations with the process of designing and implementing biometric security systems; that is, systems using identification based on biological or physiological characteristics, such as iris scans and fingerprints. This book purports to be a user’s guide to the software.

I say purports, because, after two readings, I was convinced that the general process was a good thing, that the book provided some good information on that process, and that the software might be of assistance, but I wasn’t quite clear on how. I found several problems with this book. First, the information was far from being well organized or clearly presented. Second, it wasn’t always entirely clear how the information related to the software; mentions of how to use the Bantam software were frequently vague and sketchy.

At some point while reading the book, I started to notice the frequency of sentences saying things like “Bantam is the perfect solution...” One particularly memorable page had six or seven sentences that were just saying how good Bantam was, and several others that implied (without quite saying it) the same thing. Once I noticed this, the book began to seem more like an infomercial than a user’s guide. Trying to read the book was like trying to listen to a speaker who uses the phrase “you know” three or four times a sentence: the content gets buried in the way things are expressed. Several times, I ended up counting the advertising sentences per page, or looking for new ways for the author to say how great the package was. Bantam is always referred to in capital letters, which does not help.

Twenty pages early on in the book consist of a large symbol, filling about a third of the page, and some explanatory text on the rest of the page. If there had been more content to the text this might not have been a problem, but the content is minimal, making it that much harder to take the book seriously.

The book comes with a CD. I installed the programs from the CD, and one of the installation programs complained that a file was missing. When I then went to run the program, all I could get was a canned audio/visual commercial.

To sum up, biometrics is clearly going to be a very important field, and good support for organizations considering or procuring biometric systems will be essential. The Bantam software may be just what is needed, but this book is probably not a very good way to approach providing it.